Abstract
At present, gene therapy is a very promising curing diseases. Because of the potential of non-viral gene vectors, the cat-ion lipid and DNA complexes were widely used for gene transfer studies that show high transfect efficiency. Lipid is one kind of amphiphilic molecules. The characteristics of having the hydrophilic and hydrophobic parts enable the lipids to self-assembly into specific conformation in the solution. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations is a well established method tool to understand the properties of the complex bio-molecules system. To simplify the simulation, we simulated DNA interaction with cat-ions lipid monolayer without solvent particles by using stochastic dynamics method with the coarse-grained model. In this thesis, we investigated the phenomenon of DNA adsorption by the cat-ion lipid monolayer at air-water interface with and without divalent salt. First we observed how DNA moves to the charged planar surface by electrostatic attraction between negative DNA and opposite charged plane. Single layer of DNA was absorbed to the lipid monolayer. The absorbed DNA form locally ordered arrays. Longer DNA has batter ordering than shorter DNA when they form adsorbed layer. When divalent ions were added to the system, the DNA adsorbed on the lipid monolayer would rearrange to more compact ordering (small DNA to DNA distance) and some DNA would form two layer clusters. The divalent ions play the role of gluing the DNA together and to induce the formation of closely packed clusters. More DNA can be absorbed to the lipid monolayer with the addition of divalent ions.