Journal of Physical Chemistry B, Vol.121, No.39, 9169-9174, 2017
The Sequence Dependence of Photoinduced Single Strand Break in 5-Bromo-2 '-deoxyuridine Labeled DNA Supports That Electron Transfer Is Responsible for the Damage
The UVB irradiation of DNA labeled with 5-bromo-2'-deoxyuridine (BrdU) leads to single-strand breaks (SSBs) as a major photochemical damage. Some time ago, we demonstrated that SSB is a secondary damage forming due to thermal dissociation of 2'-deoxyribonolactone generated photochemically in DNA labeled with BrdU. For the first time, we study here the variation of the yield of UVB generated SSBs with the alteration of 3'-neighbor nucleobase of electron donor (2'-deoxyguanine (dG)) and acceptor (excited BrdU) in double-stranded DNA. We showed that the experimental damage yields can be explained by the calculated ionization potentials of dG and electron affinities of excited BrdU via a kinetic scheme based on the Marcus model of electron transfer (ET). Hence, our studies on the sequence dependence of photochemical damage in DNA labeled with BrdU constitute a further argument that photochemically generated SSBs occur as a result of long-range ET.