Dramatic enhancement of the photoactivity of zinc porphyrin–ellipticine conjugates by DNA

Abstract

Both the fluorescence yield and the yield of singlet oxygen generated from the quenching of the triplet state of two water-soluble hybrid molecules ‘zinc porphyrin-ellipticine’, (1) and (2), are low compared to those of simple zinc porphyrin complexes; both these photochemical properties are dramatically enhanced by addition of calf thymus DNA to solutions of (1) or (2), as a result of the conformation change of these hybrid molecules upon interaction with double-stranded nucleic acids.