The recent studies about the interaction of phthalocyanine with DNA

Abstract

Cancer is one of the major diseases affecting all humanity with high mortality rates worldwide. Its treatment is difficult, long-term and expensive. Due to its side effects, it is troublesome for both the patient and their attendants. Cancer treatment is basically divided into three: surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Photodynamic therapy offers one of the most important and promising treatment methods, especially in recent years. Photodynamic therapy takes the steps of administering the photo-sensitizing compound to the body and stimulating it with a light of appropriate wavelength after its accumulation in the target tissue. With the formation of complex processes that take place in the target area with the reactive oxygen species formed by the stimulated compounds, death or the inhibition of the proliferation of the cells causes situations such as the destruction of the target tissue. Phthalocyanines constitute an important group of photo-sensitizers used in photodynamic therapy. Stability of these compounds and their strong absorption close to therapeutic window make these compounds important. With large Π systems, they can bind with many biological macromolecules, including DNA, with high affinity by many mechanisms, including the Π - Π stacking. This review article describes the last three years of studies in the WOS database about the interactions of phthalocyanines with DNA. The interactions of phthalocyanines with DNA are important as they can make a difference in the proliferation of tumor cells. On the other hand, DNA replication and transcription has increased due to the increasing metabolic rate of these cells. The DNA double strand opened during replication, and gene expression allows the formation of different secondary structures such as hairpin, triple, junctions, and G-quadruplex. The interaction of G-quadruplex DNA structures with these compounds, which can be formed in the guanine-rich regions of the DNA sequences opened in these processes, has been described in studies.