title: Spectroscopic evidence for the formation of goldfingers.
abstract: Gold(I) has long been used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, but the therapeutically relevant biological targets of gold(I) are not well understood. Here, we report the results of a spectroscopic investigation into the formation of goldfingers. By exploiting a thiolate to gold charge-transfer band in the UV, we observed that gold(I) interacts with zinc finger peptides with a stoichiometry of one gold ion for each two cysteine residues, forming 1:1, 1.5:1, and 2:1 adducts with zinc finger peptides containing CCHH, CCHC, and CCCC donor sets, respectively. In addition, circular dichroism experiments provided evidence that goldfingers are more ordered than the corresponding metal-free peptides but do not exhibit the canonical zinc finger structure.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA.
authors.forename: Matthew A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Franzman
authors.forename: Amy M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Barrios
mesh_terms: D002942:Circular Dichroism; D006046:Gold / Q000737:chemistry*; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010455:Peptides / Q000737:chemistry; D013053:Spectrophotometry; D017186:Titrimetry; D016335:Zinc Fingers
chemical_list: D010455:Peptides; D006046:Gold