DFT study of the interaction between the conjugated fluorescein and dabcyl system, using fluorescene quenching method

Molecular beacon is a DNA probe containing a sequence complementary to the target that is flanked by self-complementary termini, and carries a fluorophore and a quencher at the ends. We used the fluorescein and dabcyl as fluorophore and quencher respectively, and studied with DFT calculations at the GGA/DNP level, and taking into account DFT dispersion corrections by the Grimme and Tkatchenko-Scheffler (TS) schemes, the distance, where the most favorable energetic interaction between the fluorophore and quencher in conjugated form occurs. This distance occurs at a separation distance of 29.451 Å between the centers of Dabcyl and fluorescein employing the TS DFT dispersion correction scheme, indicating FRET efficiency around 94.28 %. The calculated emission spectra of the conjugated pair in water indicated that the emission and absorption spectrum overlap completely and thus no fluorescence can be observed due to the fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) effect. The DFT results confirmed the experimentally observing fluorescence quenching of the fluorescein-dabcyl conjugated system by FRET.