showing 3 related works from this author
Triplet stabilization for enhanced drug photorelease from sunscreen-based photocages
2021
[EN] Recently, sunscreen-based drug photocages have been introduced to provide UV protection to photoactive drugs, thus increasing their photosafety. Here, combined experimental and theoretical studies performed on a photocage based on the commercial UVA filter avobenzone (AB) and on the photosensitizing non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug ketoprofen (KP) are presented unveiling the photophysical processes responsible for the light-triggered release. Particular attention is paid to solvent stabilization of the drug and UV filter excited states, respectively, which leads to a switching between the triplet excited state energies of the AB and KP units. Most notably, we show that the stabiliz…
Experimental and theoretical studies on thymine photodimerization mediated by oxidatively generated DNA lesions and epigenetic intermediates.
2020
[EN] Interaction of nucleic acids with light is a scientific question of paramount relevance not only in the understanding of life functioning and evolution, but also in the insurgence of diseases such as malignant skin cancer and in the development of biomarkers and novel light-assisted therapeutic tools. This work shows that the UVA portion of sunlight, not absorbed by canonical DNA nucleobases, can be absorbed by 5-formyluracil (ForU) and 5-formylcytosine (ForC), two ubiquitous oxidatively generated lesions and epigenetic intermediates present in living beings in natural conditions. We measure the strong propensity of these molecules to populate triplet excited states able to transfer th…
Photoinduced intersystem crossing in DNA oxidative lesions and epigenetic intermediates
2020
[EN] The propensity of 5-formyluracil and 5-formylcytosine, i.e. oxidative lesions and epigenetic intermediates, in acting as intrinsic DNA photosensitizers is unraveled by using a combination of molecular modeling, simulation and spectroscopy. Exploration of potential energy surfaces and non-adiabatic dynamics confirm a higher intersystem crossing rate for 5-formyluracil, whereas the kinetic models evidence different equilibria in the excited states for both compounds.