Aminoglycosides and polyamines: targets and effects in the mammalian organism of two important groups of natural aliphatic polycations.

Abstract

Among the antibiotics isolated in the course of the last 50 years many have several amino groups and even complete polyamine moieties incorporated into their usually rather complex structures. Some of these polyamine- or aminoglycoside-containing antibiotics have antitumoral properties, mostly based on their ability to intercalate into double-stranded DNA and to produce strand breaks. There is a growing interest in these structures since there is hope of finding new therapeutically useful compounds for the treatment of cancer diseases. In the present review we confine ourselves to the “classical” aminoglycoside antibiotics, because they resemble the polyamines — putrescine, spermidine and spermine (Fig. 1) — most closely. The comparison of all aminoglycoside and polyamine-antibiotics with the polyamines would by far exceed the frame of a short review.