Reactions of hypochlorous acid with biological substrates are activated catalytically by tertiary amines.

The activation of reactions of HOCl with a variety of model substrates by tertiary amines was investigated spectroscopically by tandem-mix and stopped-flow techniques. HOCl-induced chlorination of salicylate can be sped up by several orders of magnitude by catalytic amounts of trimethylamine (TMN). The effect is obviously due to the fast generation of reactive quarternary chloramonium ions, TMN+ Cl, which act as chain carrier in a catalytic reaction cycle. Of various catalysts tested, quinine shows the highest activity; this is attributable to the quinuclidine (QN) substituent, a bicyclic tertiary amine, forming a particularly reactive chloro derivative, QN+ Cl, which does not decompose autocatalytically. The rate of catalytic salicylate chlorination as a function of pH (around pH 7) depends not at least on the basicity of the tertiary amine; the rate increases with pH in the cases of TMN and quinuclidine (high basicity), but decreases with pH in the case of MES (low basicity). Tertiary amines also catalyze the interaction between HOCl and alkenes, as shown using sorbate as model. Reaction of HOCl with the nucleotides GMP and CMP is sped up remarkably by catalytic amounts of tertiary amines. In the case of GMP the same product spectrum is produced by HOCl in absence and presence of catalyst, but a change in the product spectra is obtained when AMP and CMP are reacted with HOCl in presence of catalyst. Using poly(dA-dT).poly(dA-dT) as DNA model, it is shown that HOCl primarily induces an absorbance increase at 263 nm, which indicates unfolding of the double strand due to fast chlorination of thymidine; a subsequent secondary absorbance decrease can be explained by slow chlorination of adenosine. Both the primary and secondary processes are activated by catalytic amounts of quinine. No evidence was found for a radical pathway in TMN-mediated oxidation of formate by HOCl. The present results suggest that low concentrations of certain tertiary amines have the potential of modifying the spectrum of target molecules which can be damaged by HOCl in biological systems.