Sequence specificity of the deoxyribonuclease activity of 1,10-phenanthroline-copper ion.

A statistical analysis of a data set composed of over 1600 scission events of DNA produced by the 2:1 1,10-phenanthroline-copper complex (OP-Cu) has demonstrated that the nucleotide 5' to the site of phosphodiester bond scission is a primary influence in the kinetics of cleavage at any sequence position. The scission was less affected by the 3' neighbor. For each of the sixteen possible dinucleotides, a kinetic parameter can be computed reflecting scission at the 3' nucleotide. When used to predict the scission pattern of a DNA sequence not part of the present data set, correlation coefficients of about 0.6 between predicted and observed patterns were obtained.