Nucleic acid base pairs Stacking energy

Because of the efficiency, the density functional theory also became an object of interest for the purpose of evaluation of intermolecular interaction energies for nucleic acid base complexes. Most standard functionals provide qualitatively a good picture of interactions in H-bonded nucleic acid base pairs. However, they completely fail for stacked complexes. This is due to the inability of current functionals to describe correctly the dispersion energy. Several routes were proposed to alleviate this deficiency with different rates of success [9-12],... 

Contrary to H-bonded nucleic acid base pairs discussed in the previous section, the nature of intermolecular interactions in complexes of stacked bases was analyzed more extensively. The values of minimal, maximal, and average total stabilization energies, corrected for BSSE, for a set comprising over 80 stacked bases, are plotted in Fig. 20.1. In the case of guanine-adenine and adenine-cytosine complexes, the results are presented for two sequence contexts, i.e., A/G-G/A and A/C-C/A. The symbol AA denotes the 2-oxo-adenine - complexes of oxidized bases, and this... 

I. Dqbkowska, H.V. Gonzales, P. Jurecka, P. Hobza, Stabilization energies of the hydrogen-bonded and stacked stmctures of nucleic acid base pairs in the crystal geometries of CG, AT, and AC DNA steps and in the NMR geometry of the 5,-d(GCGAAGC)-3 hairpin Complete basis set calculations at the MP2 and CCSD(T) levels. J. Phys. Chem. A 109, 1131-1136 (2005)... 

TABLE 7.19 Stacking Energy (in kcal mol for Nucleic Acid Base Pairs... 

Figure 3. Optimal geometries of ten stacked nucleic acid base pairs. ITieir structure has been obtained using an ab initio-fitted potential. The interaction energy (kcal/mol) has been evaluated at the MP2/6-31G (0.25) level. For more details see [12a].

Our objective is to understand how the noncovalent interactions responsible for nucleic acid secondary structure (i.e. base stacking and base pairing) affect the photophysics of these multichromophoric systems. Here we describe initial experimental results that demonstrate dramatic differences in excited-state dynamics of nucleic acid polymers compared to their constituent monomers. Although ultrafast internal conversion is the dominant relaxation pathway for single bases, electronic energy relaxation in single-stranded polynucleotides... 

Whereas proteins have their low energy absorption band at 280 nm, polynucleotides typically have maxima at 260 nm (38,500 cm ). A phenomenon of particular importance in the study of nucleic acids is the hypochromic effect. In a denatured polynucleotide the absorption is approximately the sum of that of the individual components. However, when a double helical structure is formed and the bases are stacked together, there is as much as a 34% depression in the absorbance at 260 nm. This provides the basis for optical measurement of DNA melting curves (Fig. 5-45).45,86 The physical basis for the hypochromic effect is found in dipole-dipole interactions between the closely stacked base pairs.7,86,87... 

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