TY - JOUR A1 - Marques, T. S. A1 - Schürmann, Robin A1 - Ebel, Kenny A1 - Heck, C. A1 - Smialek, M. A1 - Eden, Sam A1 - Mason, N. A1 - Bald, Ilko T1 - Kinetics of molecular decomposition under irradiation of gold nanoparticles with nanosecond laser pulses-A 5-Bromouracil case study JF - Journal of Chemical Physics N2 - Laser illuminated gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) efficiently absorb light and heat up the surrounding medium, leading to versatile applications ranging from plasmonic catalysis to cancer photothermal therapy. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of the thermal, optical, and electron induced reaction pathways is required. Here, the electrophilic DNA nucleobase analog 5-Bromouracil (BrU) has been used as a model compound to study its decomposition in the vicinity of AuNPs illuminated with intense ns laser pulses under various conditions. The plasmonic response of the AuNPs and the concentration of BrU and resulting photoproducts have been tracked by ultraviolet and visible (UV–Vis) spectroscopy as a function of the irradiation time. A kinetic model has been developed to determine the reaction rates of two parallel fragmentation pathways of BrU, and their dependency on laser fluence and adsorption on the AuNP have been evaluated. In addition, the size and the electric field enhancement of the decomposed AuNPs have been determined by atomic force microscopy and finite domain time difference calculations, respectively. A minor influence of the direct photoreaction and a strong effect of the heating of the AuNPs have been revealed. However, due to the size reduction of the irradiated AuNPs, a trade-off between laser fluence and plasmonic response of the AuNPs has been observed. Hence, the decomposition of the AuNPs might be limiting the achievable temperatures under irradiation with several laser pulses. These findings need to be considered for an efficient design of catalytic plasmonic systems. KW - Kinetics KW - Gold nanoparticles KW - 5-Bromouracil PY - 2020 DO - https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5137898 VL - 152 IS - 12 SP - 24712 EP - 24712 PB - AIP Publishing AN - OPUS4-50787 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ebel, Kenny A1 - Bald, Ilko T1 - Length and Energy Dependence of Low-Energy Electron-Induced Strand Breaks in Poly(A) DNA JF - International Journal of Molecular Sciences N2 - The DNA in living cells can be effectively damaged by high-energy radiation, which can lead to cell death. Through the ionization of water molecules, highly reactive secondary species such as low-energy electrons (LEEs) with the most probable energy around 10 eV are generated, which are able to induce DNA strand breaks via dissociative electron attachment. Absolute DNA strand break cross sections of specific DNA sequences can be efficiently determined using DNA origami nanostructures as platforms exposing the target sequences towards LEEs. In this paper, we systematically study the effect of the oligonucleotide length on the strand break cross section at various irradiation energies. The present work focuses on poly-adenine sequences (d(A4), d(A8), d(A12), d(A16), and d(A20)) irradiated with 5.0, 7.0, 8.4, and 10 eV electrons. Independent of the DNA length, the strand break cross section shows a maximum around 7.0 eV electron energy for all investigated oligonucleotides confirming that strand breakage occurs through the initial formation of negative ion resonances. When going from d(A4) to d(A16), the strand break cross section increases with oligonucleotide length, but only at 7.0 and 8.4 eV, i.e., close to the maximum of the negative ion resonance, the increase in the strand break cross section with the length is similar to the increase of an estimated geometrical cross section. For d(A20), a markedly lower DNA strand break cross section is observed for all electron energies, which is tentatively ascribed to a conformational change of the dA20 sequence. The results indicate that, although there is a general length dependence of strand break cross sections, individual nucleotides do not contribute independently of the absolute strand break cross section of the whole DNA strand. The absolute quantification of sequence specific strand breaks will help develop a more accurate molecular level understanding of radiation induced DNA damage, which can then be used for optimized risk estimates in cancer radiation therapy. KW - DNA origami KW - DNA radiation damage KW - DNA strand breaks KW - Low-energy electrons KW - Sequence dependence PY - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-503563 DO - https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21010111 VL - 21 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 11 PB - MDPI CY - Basel, Switzerland AN - OPUS4-50356 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -