DNA Recognition with Dimeric Calixarenes

This work was performed during the period from August 2007 to April 2011 at the Department of Organic Chemistry, University of Duisburg-Essen, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Thomas Schrader. Firstly, we synthezed a new class of calixarene dimers and elucidated their binding mechanism towards various nucleic acids. The results of multiple established DNA binding assays provided experimental evidence for noncovalent major groove recognition. Secondly, we replaced the simple alkyl bridge between both calixarenes by a triimidazole bridge. The triimidazole bridge was able to recognize the base sequence, and we found that this dimer showed the strongest affinity for a predicted DNA sequence. We believed that our work paved the way to sequence-selective DNA recognition inside the major groove.