Understanding the light-driven chemistry of nucleic acid bases is paramount. Emphasis in this area by our research group is focused toward unveiling the structural elements that regulate the electronic relaxation pathways in the canonical nucleobases from experimental and computational perspectives, and applying this fundamental information to advance nucleic acid derivatives for photo-therapeutic and structural-biology applications. In this presentation, I will show that targeted functionalization can be used to develop analogues of the canonical nucleobases exhibiting more than 100 nm redshifted absorption spectra and nearly 100% greater photoreactivity, which, when applied in vitro with a low dose of light, substantially decrease the proliferation of skin cancer cells.

Using fundamental photochemistry to drive drug development and structural-biology applications

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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