Abstract: Artificial nucleic acid cleavage agents have received considerable attention due to their very important applications in biochemistry and molecular biology. Seryl-histidine is a dipeptide possessing DNA, protein and ester cleavage activity. Since peptide dendrimers have a lot of unique physical and chemical properties compared to normal peptide chain and have a great varieties of applications in biological areas, two and four branched seryl-histidine planted peptide dendrimers were synthesized by Fmoc solid phase peptide synthesis approach. The products were purified by HPLC and characterized by ESI-MS. Their DNA cleavage activities were tested by means of Agarose Gel Electrophoresis. In the cleavage reaction, peptide dendrimer showed a strong combining inclination to DNA, highly concentrated dendrimer solution can quench the fluorescence of EB. Even though, the DNA cleavage activity of the dendrimers was lower than that of seryl-histidine dipeptide monomer.

Key words: Seryl-histdine dipeptide, Peptide dendrimer, DNA cleavage