Theoretical and Experimental Study of Charge Transfer Through DNA: Impact of Mercury Mediated T-Hg-T Base Pair

Irena Kratochvílová1, Martin Vala2, Martin Weiter2, Ondřej Páv3, Jakub Šebera3, Vladimír Sychrovský3

1Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, v.v.i, Na Slovance 2, CZ-182 21, Prague 8, Czech Republic

2Materials Research Centre, Faculty of Chemistry, Brno University of Technology, Purkyňova 118, CZ-612 00 Brno, Czech Republic

3Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, v.v.i., Flemingovo náměstí 2, CZ-16610 Prague 6,Czech Republic

 

DNA-Hg complexes may play an important role in sensing of DNA defects or in detecting of  Hg presence in the environment. A fundamental way of characterizing DNA-Hg complexes is to study the way how the electric charge is transferred through the molecular chain. The main goal of this contribution was to investigate the impact of a mercury metal cation that links two thymine bases in a DNA T-T mismatched base pair (T-Hg-T) on charge transfer through the DNA molecule. We compared the charge transfer efficiencies in standard DNA, DNA with mismatched T-T base pairs and DNA with T-Hg(II)-T base pair. For this purpose we measured the temperature dependence of steady-state fluorescence and UV-VIS of the DNA molecules. The experimental results were confronted with the results obtained employing theoretical DFT methods. Generally, the efficiency of charge transfer was driven by mercury changing the spatial overlap of bases.