Distinguishing the responsive mechanisms of fluorescent probes to hydrogen peroxide, proteins, and DNA/RNA.

ABSTRACT

The responsive mechanisms of cationic quinolinium-vinyl-N,N-dimethylaniline boronate (QVD-B) derivative probes to hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), proteins and DNA/RNA are theoretically investigated in this study. The potential energy curves of QVD-B scanned on a dihedral angle (N+-C-CC) in the first singlet (S1) state exhibit large torsional energy barriers. Additionally, the energy of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) of an acceptor moiety (-3.14 eV) is lower than that of a donor moiety (-1.13 eV) in QVD-B. This demonstrates that photoinduced electron transfer (PET) quenches the fluorescence of QVD-B, as opposed to the previous report of intramolecular single-bond rotation. After reacting with H2O2, the reaction product of quinoline-vinyl-N,N-dimethylaniline (QVD) turns off the PET pathway and turns on the fluorescence at 550 nm, which is consistent with the experimental results (580 nm). Among the possible configurations of QVD-B that forms with proteins and DNA, the calculated fluorescence values of corresponding twisted QVD-B-P (638 nm) and QVD-B-D (686 nm) are consistent with the experimental results (632 and 688 nm). The frontier molecular orbital and electron-hole analysis show that the charge transfer distance follows the order of QVD (1.88 Å) < QVD-B-P (4.49 Å) < QVD-B-D (6.39 Å), which induces the fluorescence red-shifts of QVD-B-P and QVD-B-D compared to that of QVD. The multi-detection mechanism of the fluorescent probe QVD-B is attributed to PET progress and different degrees of local charge transfer after photoexcitation.