همایش ملی بیوانفورماتیک ایران

صفحه اصلی / 4th international edition and 13th Iranian Conference on Bioinformatics

Curcumin’s Journey Through Cellulose: Binding Dynamics Across Cellulose-derived Bio-Nanofibers

نویسندگان :

Ayla Esmaeilzadeh¹ Maryam Azimzadeh Irani² Mehdi Jahanfar³ Naser Farrokhi⁴

1- Faculty of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran. 2- Faculty of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran. 3- Faculty of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran. 4- Faculty of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.

کلمات کلیدی :

Curcumin،Cellulose Nanofibers،Molecular Docking،Acetylation،Hydroxypropyl Methylation

چکیده :

Curcumin is a polyphenolic compound extracted from Curcuma longa with promising anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties (Karaboga Arslan et al., 2022; Zoi et al., 2021). The bioavailability of curcumin is limited due to its short half-life, low solubility, instability, rapid metabolism, and systemic clearance. Therefore, developing drug delivery systems for the efficient transfer of curcumin would be eminent (Hardwick et al., 2021; Huang et al., 2023; Tabanelli and Brogi, 2021). A way forward would be using cellulosic compounds as it has been proposed a well-suited candidate for drug-delivery applications. Cellulose, with its hydrophilicity, superior mechanical qualities, biocompatibility, high water retention, surface modification, and slow drug release abilities has been a prominent choice (Liu et al., 2021; Pandey, 2021; Raghav and Sharma, 2021; Wang et al., 2024). Additionally, cellulose can be surface-modified by chemical groups, promising greater possibilities in efficient and targeted drug-delivery applications (Khine and Stenzel, 2020; Lukova and Katsarov, 2023). In this structural study, different forms of cellulose were studied for their potential in drug delivery of curcumin. The 3D structures of cellulose fibers I (α and β), II, IIII, IVI, IVII, I triacetate, II triacetate, and II hydrate were obtained from the Polysac3db database (Sarkar and Pérez, 2012). Two common cellulose nanofiber arrangements in natural systems (cylindrical and planar) were obtained from a molecular dynamics study, validated by SEM analysis on electrospun cellulose nanofibers (Azimzadeh Irani et al., 2023). The 2D structures of curcumin (PubChem CID: 969516) and modified units of cellulose, namely methylcellulose, cellulose triacetate, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, and hydroxyethyl cellulose were extracted from PubChem (PubChem CIDs: 51063134, 230396, 57503849, and 24846132, respectively) (PubChem). Subsequently, the 3D coordinates of these structures were generated using Open Babel (O’Boyle et al., 2011; OPENBABEL). The obtained structures were geometrically optimized using Avogadro with 1000 steps of Steepest Descent (Hanwell et al., 2012; Avogadro). Molecular dockings of curcumin and cellulose nanofibers were performed using AutoDock 4.2 and AutoDockTools (Morris et al., 2009). All dockings included 10 genetic algorithm runs with 25000000 as the maximum energy evaluations. The results were visualized using PyMOL (PyMOL). According to the results, cellulose II and Iβ fibers formed the strongest interactions with curcumin among the oligomeric structures, with binding energies of -5.84 and 5.31 kcal/mol, respectively. The results also demonstrated that the acetylation of cellulose I and II oligomers led to a higher affinity for curcumin. The binding energy of curcumin and cellulose I triacetate was -8.25 kcal/mol, followed by a binding energy of -7.70 kcal/mol in interaction with cellulose II triacetate. Moreover, when comparing the data obtained from cellulose units, hydroxypropyl methylation of cellulose resulted in the lowest binding energy with curcumin, -3.80 kcal/mol. This was compared to hydroxethylation, acetylation, and methylation on cellulose units, with curcumin binding energies of -3.74, -3.59, and -2.82 kcal/mol, respectively. This study demonstrates that different cellulose structures and specific surface modifications influence the binding affinity of curcumin. Cellulose fibers Iβ and II interact strongly with curcumin, while acetylation and hydroxypropyl methylation modifications on cellulose create even stronger candidates for curcumin delivery.