Photophysical Properties of Atto655 Dye in the Presence of Guanosine and Tryptophan in Aqueous Solution

Atto655 has been widely used as an excellent probing dye through photoinduced electron transfer (PET) for biochemical processes in oligonucleotides or polypeptides. However, its photophysical properties in the presence of the quenchers guanosine and tryptophan have not been carefully studied. In this work, we investigated the dynamics of PET between Atto655 and the two quenchers in aqueous solution with femtosecond transient absorption experiments. We derived that the charge separation rate is 8.1 x 10(9) s(-1) and the charge recombination rate is 7.7 x 10(10) s(-1) for the collision complex between Atto655 and guanosine and that the corresponding values for the collision complex between Atto655 and tryptophan are 4.0 x 10(11) and 5.0 x 10(12) s(-1), respectively. These experimental results are quite consistent with the prediction of Marcus-type theory for electron transfer. The implications of this work for the data analysis of PET-based fluorescence correlation spectroscopy are discussed.