On the origin of the electronic and magnetic circular dichroism of naphthyl C-glycosides: Anomeric configuration

Aryl C-glycosides, in which the glycosidic bond is changed to a carbon-carbon bond, are an important family of biologically-active compounds. They often serve as secondary metabolites or exhibit antibiotic and cytostatic activities. Their stability to hydrolysis has made them attractive targets for new drugs. Their conformational behavior often strongly influences the resulting function. Their detailed structural and conformational description is thus highly desirable. This work studies the structure of three different naphthyl C-glycosides using UV-vis absorption as well as electronic and magnetic circular dichroism. It also describes their conformational preferences using a combination of molecular dynamics and DFT calculations. The reliability of these preferences has been verified by simulations of spectral properties and a comparison with their measured spectra. In particular, ECD spectroscopy has been shown to distinguish easily between α- and β-pseudoanomers of aryl C-glycosides. Computer simulations and spectral decomposition have revealed how the resulting ECD patterns of the naphthyl glycosides studied are influenced by different conformer populations. In conclusion, reliable ECD patterns cannot be calculated by separating the naphthyl rotation from other conformational motions. MCD patterns have been similar for all the naphthyl C-glycosides studied. No clear diagnostic features have been found for either the pseudoanomeric configuration or the preferred hydroxymethyl rotamer. Nevertheless, the work has demonstrated the potential of MCD for the study of aryl glycosides interacting with proteins.

Effect of the Thermal Fluctuations of the Photophysics of GC and CG DNA Steps: A Computational Dynamical Study

Here we refine and assess two computational procedures aimed to include the effect of thermal fluctuations on the electronic spectra and the ultrafast excited state dynamics of multichromophore systems, focusing on DNA duplexes. Our approach is based on a fragment diabatization procedure that, from a given Quantum Mechanical (QM) reference method, can provide the parameters (energy and coupling) of the reference diabatic states on the basis of the isolated fragments, either for a purely electronic excitonic Hamiltonian (FrDEx) or a linear vibronic coupling Hamiltonian (FrD-LVC). After having defined the most cost-effective procedure for DNA duplexes on two smaller fragments, FrDEx is used to simulate the absorption and Electronic Circular Dichroism (ECD) spectra of (GC)₅ sequences, including the coupling with the Charge Transfer (CT) states, on a number of structures extracted from classical Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. The computed spectra are close to the reference TD-DFT calculations and fully consistent with the experimental ones. We then couple MD simulations and FrD-LVC to simulate the interplay between local excitations and CT transitions, both intrastrand and interstrand, in GC and CG steps when included in a oligoGC or in oligoAT DNA sequence. We predict that for both sequences a substantial part of the photoexcited population on G and C decays, within 50-100 fs, to the corresponding intrastrand CT states. This transfer is more effective for GC steps that, on average, are more closely stacked than CG ones.

Natural and magnetic circular dichroism spectra of nucleosides: effect of the dynamics and environment

Chiroptical spectroscopic methods are excellent tools to study structure and interactions of biomolecules. However, their sensitivity to different structural aspects varies. To understand the dependence of absorption, electronic and magnetic circular dichroism (ECD, MCD) intensities on the structure, dynamics and environment, we measured and simulated spectra of nucleosides and other nucleic acid model components. The conformation space was explored by molecular dynamics (MD), the electronic spectra were generated using time dependent density functional theory (TDDFT). The sum over state (SOS) method was employed for MCD. The results show that accounting for the dynamics is crucial for reproduction of the experiment. While unpolarized absorption spectroscopy is relatively indifferent, ECD reflects the conformation and geometry dispersion more. MCD spectra provide variable response dependent on the wavelength and structural change. In general, MCD samples the structure more locally than ECD. Simple computational tests suggest that the optical spectroscopies coupled with the computational tools provide useful information about nucleic acid components, including base pairing and stacking.

Studying the excited electronic states of guanine rich DNA quadruplexes by quantum mechanical methods: main achievements and perspectives

Calculations are providing more and more useful insights into the interaction between light and DNA quadruplexes.

Cooperative Effects of Cytosine Methylation on DNA Structure and Dynamics

The behavior of the structural parameters of DNA considering different levels of methylation in CpG islands is studied by means of full-atom molecular dynamics simulations and electronic circular dichroism, both in an artificial model system and in a gene promoter sequence. It is demonstrated that methylation although intrinsically brings quite local perturbations may, if its level is high enough, induce cooperative effects that strongly modify the DNA backbone torsional parameters altering the helicity as compared to the nonmethylated case. Because methylation of the CpG island is correlated with the regulation of gene expression, understanding the structural modifications induced in DNA is crucial to characterize all the fine equilibria into play in epigenetics phenomena.

Steady-State Linear and Non-linear Optical Spectroscopy of Organic Chromophores and Bio-macromolecules

Bio-macromolecules as DNA, lipid membranes and (poly)peptides are essential compounds at the core of biological systems. The development of techniques and methodologies for their characterization is therefore necessary and of utmost interest, even though difficulties can be experienced due to their intrinsic complex nature. Among these methods, spectroscopies, relying on optical properties are especially important to determine their macromolecular structures and behaviors, as well as the possible interactions and reactivity with external dyes—often drugs or pollutants—that can (photo)sensitize the bio-macromolecule leading to eventual chemical modifications, thus damages. In this review, we will focus on the theoretical simulation of electronic spectroscopies of bio-macromolecules, considering their secondary structure and including their interaction with different kind of (photo)sensitizers. Namely, absorption, emission and electronic circular dichroism (CD) spectra are calculated and compared with the available experimental data. Non-linear properties will be also taken into account by two-photon absorption, a highly promising technique (i) to enhance absorption in the red and infra-red windows and (ii) to enhance spatial resolution. Methodologically, the implications of using implicit and explicit solvent, coupled to quantum and thermal samplings of the phase space, will be addressed. Especially, hybrid quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) methods are explored for a comparison with solely QM methods, in order to address the necessity to consider an accurate description of environmental effects on spectroscopic properties of biological systems.

Model Order Reduction Algorithm for Estimating the Absorption Spectrum

The ab initio description of the spectral interior of the absorption spectrum poses both a theoretical and computational challenge for modern electronic structure theory. Due to the often spectrally dense character of this domain in the quantum propagator's eigenspectrum for medium-to-large sized systems, traditional approaches based on the partial diagonalization of the propagator often encounter oscillatory and stagnating convergence. Electronic structure methods which solve the molecular response problem through the solution of spectrally shifted linear systems, such as the complex polarization propagator, offer an alternative approach which is agnostic to the underlying spectral density or domain location. This generality comes at a seemingly high computational cost associated with solving a large linear system for each spectral shift in some discretization of the spectral domain of interest. In this work, we present a novel, adaptive solution to this high computational overhead based on model order reduction techniques via interpolation. Model order reduction reduces the computational complexity of mathematical models and is ubiquitous in the simulation of dynamical systems and control theory. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in the ab initio prediction of X-ray absorption spectra is demonstrated using a test set of challenging water clusters which are spectrally dense in the neighborhood of the oxygen K-edge. On the basis of a single, user defined tolerance we automatically determine the order of the reduced models and approximate the absorption spectrum up to the given tolerance. We also illustrate that, for the systems studied, the automatically determined model order increases logarithmically with the problem dimension, compared to a linear increase of the number of eigenvalues within the energy window. Furthermore, we observed that the computational cost of the proposed algorithm only scales quadratically with respect to the problem dimension.

Simulation of Electronic Circular Dichroism of Nucleic Acids: From the Structure to the Spectrum

We present a quantum mechanical (QM) simulation of the electronic circular dichroism (ECD) of nucleic acids (NAs). The simulation combines classical molecular dynamics, to obtain the structure and its temperature-dependent fluctuations, with a QM excitonic model to determine the ECD. The excitonic model takes into account environmental effects through a polarizable embedding and uses a refined approach to calculate the electronic couplings in terms of full transition densities. Three NAs with either similar conformations but different base sequences or similar base sequences but different conformations have been investigated and the results were compared with experimental observations; a good agreement was seen in all cases. A detailed analysis of the nature of the ECD bands in terms of their excitonic composition was also carried out. Finally, a comparison between the QM and the DeVoe models clearly revealed the importance of including fluctuations of the excitonic parameters and of accurately determining the electronic couplings. This study demonstrates the feasibility of the ab initio simulation of the ECD spectra of NAs, that is, without the need of experimental structural or electronic data.

A fast but accurate excitonic simulation of the electronic circular dichroism of nucleic acids: how can it be achieved?

We present and discuss a simple and fast computational approach to the calculation of electronic circular dichroism spectra of nucleic acids. It is based on a exciton model in which the couplings are obtained in terms of the full transition-charge distributions, as resulting from TDDFT methods applied on the individual nucleobases. We validated the method on two systems, a DNA G-quadruplex and a RNA β-hairpin whose solution structures have been accurately determined by means of NMR. We have shown that the different characteristics of composition and structure of the two systems can lead to quite important differences in the dependence of the accuracy of the simulation on the excitonic parameters. The accurate reproduction of the CD spectra together with their interpretation in terms of the excitonic composition suggest that this method may lend itself as a general computational tool to both predict the spectra of hypothetic structures and define clear relationships between structural and ECD properties.

Quantum Mechanical Studies on the Photophysics and the Photochemistry of Nucleic Acids and Nucleobases

The photophysics and photochemistry of DNA is of great importance due to the potential damage of the genetic code by UV light. Quantum mechanical studies have played a key role in interpretating the results of modern time-resolved pump-probe spectroscopy, and in elucidating the main photoactivated reactive paths. This review provides a concise, complete picture of the computational studies carried out, approximately, in the past decade. We start with an overview of the photophysics of the nucleobases in the gas phase and in solution. We discuss the proposed mechanisms for ultrafast decay to the ground state, that involve conical intersections, consider the role of triplet states, and analyze how the solvent modulates the photophysics. Then we move to larger systems, from dinucleotides to single- and double-stranded oligonucleotides. We focus on the possible role of charge transfer and delocalized or excitonic states in the photophysics of these systems and discuss the main photochemical paths. We finish with an outlook on the current challenges in the field and future directions of research.