Human apurinic/apyrimidinic (AP) endonuclease APE1 catalyses the hydrolysis of phosphodiester bonds on the 5′ side of an AP-site (in the base excision repair pathway) and of some damaged nucleotides (in the nucleotide incision repair pathway). The range of substrate specificity includes structurally unrelated damaged nucleotides. Here, to examine the mechanism of broad substrate specificity of APE1, we performed pulsed electron–electron double resonance (PELDOR) spectroscopy and pre-steady-state kinetic analysis with Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) detection of DNA conformational changes during DNA binding and lesion recognition. Equilibrium PELDOR and kinetic FRET data revealed that DNA binding by APE1 leads to noticeable damage-dependent bending of a DNA duplex. Molecular dynamics simulations showed that the damaged nucleotide is everted from the DNA helix and placed into the enzyme’s binding pocket, which is formed by Asn-174, Asn-212, Asn-229, Ala-230, Phe-266 and Trp-280. Nevertheless, no damage-specific contacts were detected between these amino acid residues in the active site of the enzyme and model damaged substrates containing 1,N6-ethenoadenosine, α-adenosine, 5,6-dihydrouridine or F-site. These data suggest that the substrate specificity of APE1 is controlled by the ability of a damaged nucleotide to flip out from the DNA duplex in response to an enzyme-induced DNA distortion.

Pulsed double electron–electron resonance technique (PELDOR or DEER) is often applied to study conformations and aggregation of spin-labelled macromolecules. Because of the ill-posed nature of the integral equation determining the distance distribution function, a regularization procedure is required to restrict the smoothness of the solution. In this work, we performed PELDOR measurements for new flexible nitroxide biradicals based on trolox, which is the synthetic analogue of α-tocopherol; spin-labelled trolox derivatives are investigated as potential anti-cancer drugs. We use regularization by an approximation of the solution with a sum of limited number of Gaussians, by varying their positions, widths and amplitudes. Their best-fitted values were found by a completely random Monte Carlo process. The use of the frequency-domain PELDOR data allowed diminution of the artifacts induced by spin–spin electron–nuclear and intermolecular electron–electron interactions. It was found that for the all biradicals studied, the use of three Gaussians was enough for good agreement with the experiments. The number of trials for obtaining satisfactory result was found to be quite reasonable, which is explained by presence of the singularity in the core of integral equation. The maxima of inter-spin distance distribution for different biradicals were found to vary between 1.5 and 2.3 nm, depending on the linkers between the Trolox core and nitroxides. The distance distributions around these positions reflect flexibility of the biradicals.

The model-free approach used does not introduce systematic distortions in the computed distance distribution function between two spins and appears to result in noise grouping in the short distance range.