Understanding water-mediated DNA damage production by molecular dynamics calculation of solvent accessibility

Yonetani, Yoshiteru*; Nakagawa, Hiroshi   

We calculated solvent accessibility of DNA backbone hydrogen sites, H1'-H5' by using molecular dynamics simulation of DNA. The result of accessibility is well correlated with the site-dependent reactivity with OH radicals experimentally reported, indicating that the different DNA-radical reactivity is mainly caused by the difference in the solvent accessibility of each hydrogen site. Compared with the previous calculation with solvent-accessible surface area, the present MD-based counting of molecular access provided a slightly improved result, which suggests importance of more realistic molecular components such as electrostatic interactions and DNA conformational fluctuation.