Energy Dissipation Hypothesis Applied to Enhance the Affinity of Thrombin Binding Aptamer

Nucleic acid aptamers are artificial recognizing molecules that are capable of specific binding to a wide variety of targets. Aptamers are commonly selected from a huge library of oligonucleotides and improved by introducing several mutations or modular constructions. Although aptamers hold great promise as therapeutic and diagnostic tools, no simple approach to improve their affinity has been suggested yet. Our recent analysis of aptamer–protein complexes revealed that aptamer affinity correlates with the size of an amino acid sidechain in the protein interface that was explained by efficient dissipation of the energy released during complex formation. G-quadruplex-based thrombin aptamers are not involved in the described dependence. Moreover, aptamers to the same thrombin site have 100-fold differences in affinity. Here we focused on a detailed analysis of the nucleic acid interface of thrombin–aptamer complexes. High affinity of the aptamers was shown to correlate with the solvent accessibility of the apolar part of recognizing loops. To prove the concept experimentally, these loops were modified to enhance contact with the solvent. Dissociation rates of the aptamer–thrombin complexes were drastically slowed due to these modifications. In full correspondence with the energy dissipation hypothesis, the modifications improved both the stability of the G-quadruplexes and affinity to thrombin. The most evident effect was shown for unstable Na+-coordinated G-quadruplexes. These data are of high interest for a directed improvement of aptamers introducing unnatural modifications into the ‘hot spot’ residues.