Interaction of prometryn to human serum albumin: Insights from spectroscopic and molecular docking studies

• The fluorescence quenching of HSA by prometryn was a static quenching.
• The binding of prometryn to HSA mainly took place in subdomain IIA (site I).
• Molecular modeling studies confirmed the binding site and binding mode.
• The binding of prometryn to HSA induced the conformational alteration of HSA.

Prometryn possesses much potential hazard to environment because of its chemical stability and biological toxicity. Here, the binding properties of prometryn with human serum albumin (HSA) and the protein structural changes were determined under simulative physiological conditions (pH 7.4) by multispectroscopic methods including fluorescence, UV–vis absorption, Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) and circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy, coupled with molecular modeling technique. The result of fluorescence titration suggested that the fluorescence quenching of HSA by prometryn was considered as a static quenching procedure. The negative enthalpy change (ΔH○) and positive entropy change (ΔS○) values indicated that the binding process was governed mainly by hydrophobic interactions and hydrogen bonds. The site marker displacement experiments suggested the location of prometryn binding to HSA was Sudlow’s site I in subdomain IIA. Furthermore, molecular docking studies revealed prometryn can bind in the large hydrophobic activity of subdomain IIA. Analysis of UV–vis absorption, synchronous fluorescence, CD and FT-IR spectra demonstrated that the addition of prometryn resulted in rearrangement and conformational alteration of HSA with reduction in α-helix and increases in β-sheet, β-turn and random coil structures. This work provided reasonable model helping us further understand the transportation, distribution and toxicity effect of prometryn when it spreads into human blood serum.

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