UV-induced damage of DNA: the role of short- and longlived excited states (Prof. W. Zinth)
- Date: May 5, 2015
- Time: 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Professor Dr. Wolfgang Zinth, Lehrstuhl fuer BioMolekulare Optik, Fakultaet fuer Physik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München
- Room: Herbert Walther Lecture Hall
- Host: MPQ
The formation of DNA photo-lesions leads to cell death, mutations and
cancer. Until now most publications on DNA-photodamage focused on single
DNA-bases, where extremely rapid relaxation processes depopulate the
harmful excited states and reduce the probability of damage formation.
However it was shown only recently, that the real information carriers,
the DNA strands, display much longer decay times. In this talk the
different issues of photolesion formation in single bases and stranded
DNA are discussed. By time-resolved IR-spectroscopy in the picosecond to
microsecond range we characterized the nature of the long-lived excited
states in DNA. We present new observations on charge transfer in
stranded DNA and discuss decay channels which may preserve the integrity
of double-stranded DNA.