Molecular modeling of a benzophenanthridine alkaloid sanguinarine with deoxyribonucleic acid sequences: Evidence of intercalation and base specificity

The interactions of small natural alkaloids with nucleic acids have created considerable interest in the field of antitumor drug design; but still critical information linking the physico–chemical properties associated with these complexes with their biological effectiveness remains unclear. Significant progress has been made toward simplifying the structural and dynamic properties of many natural ligand–DNA complexes by molecular modeling approach which has provided pivotal insight into the design and development of more effective second generation therapeutic agents for the successful treatments of many types of cancer due to less sampling time and quick accurate results. We report for the first time the minimized structure of sanguinarine and studied its interaction with various synthetic DNA sequences by molecular docking. The results confirm the intercalative nature of alkaloid and its preference for GC base pairs than AT.