Investigation of the behavior of HSA upon binding to amlodipine and propranolol: Spectroscopic and molecular modeling approaches.

The interaction between human serum albumin (HSA) and two drugs - amlodipine and propranolol - was investigated using fluorescence, UV absorption and circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy. In addition, the binding site was established by applying molecular modeling technique. Fluorescence data suggest that amlodipine will quench the intrinsic fluorescence of HSA; whereas propranolol enhances the fluorescence of HSA. The binding constants for the interaction of amlodipine and propranolol with HSA were found to be 3.63×10(5)M(-1) and 2.29×10(4)M(-1), respectively. The percentage of secondary structure feature of each one of the HSA-bound drugs, i.e. the α-helix content, was estimated empirically by circular dichroism. The results indicated that amlodipine causes an increase, and that propranolol leads to a decrease in α-helix content of HSA. The spectroscopic analysis indicates that the binding mechanisms of the two drugs are different from each other. The data obtained by the molecular modeling study indicated that these drugs bind, with different affinity, to different sites located in subdomain IIA and IIIA.

An approach based on diffusion to study ligand-macromolecule interaction.

A new approach has been developed to study binding of a ligand to a macromolecule based on the diffusion process. In terms of the Fick's first law, the concentration of free ligand in the presence of a protein can be determined by the measurement of those ligands which are diffused out. This method is applied to the study of binding of methyl-orange to lysozyme in phosphate buffer of pH 6.2, at 30 degrees C. The binding isotherm was determined initially, followed by application of the Hill equation to the data obtained, then binding constant and binding capacity were estimated.