Kinetics of Photoinduced Reactions at the Single-Molecule Level: The KACB Method

The kinetics of photoinduced reactions can be approached by laser flash photolysis techniques. Although such techniques allow for a detailed understanding of the important photophysics of molecules, they normally require a substantial amount of sample for measurements (>1 nmol), and thus, they are difficult to apply to analytical and diagnostic applications. The photophysics of a fluorescent molecule can be accessed by monitoring the kinetics of the fluctuation of fluorescence, which is called blinking. Blinking is a phenomenon that can be monitored only if molecules are observed at the single-molecule level. In bulk solution, blinking kinetics can be measured by using fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), which normally requires more than 10⁵ times less sample than that required for laser flash photolysis. Blinking is controlled to extract fruitful microenvironmental information around a fluorescent molecule, by using a method named kinetic analysis based on the control of fluorescence blinking (KACB). This Concept highlights the adaption of the KACB method to investigate the local conformation of DNA with less than 1 pmol of DNA sample.