Optical properties of silver-mediated DNA from molecular dynamics and time dependent density functional theory

Esko Makkonen, Patrick Rinke, Olga Lopez-Acevedo, Xi Chen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

We report a combined quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) molecular dynamics and time-dependent density functional (TDDFT) study of metal-mediated deoxyribonucleic acid (M-DNA) nanostructures. For the Ag+-mediated guanine tetramer, we found the maug-cc-pvdz basis set to be sufficient for calculating electronic circular dichroism (ECD) spectra. Our calculations further show that the B3LYP, CAM-B3LYP, B3LYP*, and PBE exchange-correlation functionals are all able to predict negative peaks in the measured ECD spectra within a 20 nm range. However, a spurious positive peak is present in the CAM-B3LYP ECD spectra. We trace the origins of this spurious peak and find that is likely due to the sensitivity of silver atoms to the amount of Hartree–Fock exchange in the exchange-correlation functional. Our presented approach provides guidance for future computational investigations of other Ag+-mediated DNA species.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2346
JournalInternational Journal of Molecular Sciences
Volume19
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - 9 Aug 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • DNA
  • ECD
  • QM/MM
  • Silver
  • TDDFT

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