Electronic excited states of guanine-cytosine hairpins and duplexes studied by fluorescence spect...

Guanine-cytosine hairpins, containing a hexaethylene glycol bridge, are studied by steady-state fluorescence spectroscopy and time-correlated single photon counting; their properties are compared to those of duplexes with the same sequence. It is shown that, both in hairpins and in duplexes, base pairing induces quenching of the pi pi(star) fluorescence, the quantum yield decreasing by at least two orders of magnitude. When the size of the systems increases from two to ten base pairs, a fluor...