Water forms chiral superstructure around DNA, reports group

“It’s uniquely adapted to biology, and vice versa,” said Poul Petersen, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University. “It’s super-flexible. It dissipates energy and mediates interactions, and that’s becoming more recognised in biological systems.”
The way in which water relates to and interacts with biological systems – such as DNA, the building blocks of life – is of critical importance, and Petersen’s group has used a relatively new form of spectroscopy to observe a previously unknown characteristic of water.

Chiral is key to water

“DNA’s chiral spine of hydration,” reports the first observation of a chiral water superstructure surrounding a biomolecule. In this case, the water structure follows the iconic helical structure of DNA, which is also chiral – meaning it is not superimposable on its mirror image. Chirality is a key factor in biology, because most biomolecules and pharmaceuticals are chiral.

Water plays a major role in DNA’s structure and function, and its hydration shell has been the subject of much study. Molecular dynamics simulations have shown a broad range of behaviours of water structure in DNA’s minor groove, the area where the backbones of the helical strand are close together.

The group’s work employed chiral sum frequency generation spectroscopy (SFG), a technique Petersen detailed in a 2015 paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. It entails a nonlinear optical method in which two photon beams – one infrared and one visible – interact with the sample, producing an SFG beam that contains the sum of the two beams’ frequencies. In this case, the sample was a strand of DNA linked to a silicon-coated prism.

Further manipulation of the beams and calculation proved the existence of a chiral water superstructure surrounding DNA.
In addition to the novelty of observing a chiral water structure template by a biomolecule, chiral SFG provides a direct way to examine water in biology.
“The techniques we have developed provide a new avenue to study DNA hydration, as well as other supramolecular chiral structures,” Petersen said.

What’s the significance?

The group admits that their finding’s biological relevance is unclear, but Petersen thinks the ability to directly examine water and its behaviour within biological systems is important.

Another application, Petersen suggests, could be in creating better anti-biofouling materials, which are resistant to the accumulation of microorganisms, algae etc. on wetted surfaces.