Antibacterial fluoroquinolone drug binding to DNA mediated by metal ions

Over the last decade the fluoroquinolones have become a dominant class of antibacterial agents. How these drugs kill bacteria remains unclear. A large amount of biological data has indicated that the functional target for the drug action is the enzyme DNA gyrase, however, models involving direct DNA binding have recently been proposed. The project will focus on a limited number of fluoroquinolones and try to characterise the binding properties with DNA oligomers by NMR spectroscopic techniques and molecul ar modelling. The effect of different metal ions on the adduct formation will be investigated. The main objective will be to search for new structure-activity relationships, which eventually will be useful for further drug design.