Chemistry Commons^™

Photocrosslinking Probes Proximity Of Thymine Modifiers Tethering Excitonically Coupled Dye Aggregates To Dna Holliday Junction, Shibani Basu, Keitel Cervantes-Salguero, Bernard Yurke, William B. Knowlton, Jeunghoon Lee, Olga A. Mass

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

A DNA Holliday junction (HJ) has been used as a versatile scaffold to create a variety of covalently templated molecular dye aggregates exhibiting strong excitonic coupling. In these dye-DNA constructs, one way to attach dyes to DNA is to tether them via single long linkers to thymine modifiers incorporated in the core of the HJ. Here, using photoinduced [2 + 2] cycloaddition (photocrosslinking) between thymines, we investigated the relative positions of squaraine-labeled thymine modifiers in the core of the HJ, and whether the proximity of thymine modifiers correlated with the excitonic coupling strength in squaraine dimers. Photocrosslinking between squaraine-labeled thymine …