The ribosome is a potential target for several classes of antibiotics because of its accessibility and structural diversity. Several antibiotics bind to different sites within the ribosome to inhibit the ribosomal assembly and translation process. However, bacteria have become resistant to most of the antibiotics. It is therefore, important to design and develop new therapeutic agents. The first step towards the development of drugs is to find ideal targets sites that are not only functionally important, but also accessible to various compounds. Cisplatin is a well known anticancer drug that forms various adducts with DNA and RNA. My project involves utilizing cisplatin to probe accessible guanine residues in RNA model systems, 16S rRNA, and the ribosome.
Figure 1. Structure of cisplatin , E. coli 16S rRNA seconday structure, and helix 24 of 16S rRNA with the DNA primer for primer extension analysis are shown. (1)
