Trifunctional fluorescent unnatural nucleoside: Label free detection of T-T/C-C base mismatches, abasic site and bulge DNA

The detection and targeting of both the mismatched and abasic DNA is highly important which would ultimately help in designing new diagnostics and chemotherapeutics. Furthermore, sensing and targeting the bulge sequence with a fluorescent probe would be useful to study the role of bulges in nucleic acid function or could have significant therapeutic potential. Thus, detection of specific bulges by small fluorescent molecules is an attractive research area since the past several years. Many attempts have been made to prepare such compounds. We report herein a label free strategy for the detection of pyrimidine base mismatches (T/T and C/C), sensing of abasic site, and pyrimidine base bulge DNA using an unnatural tetrazolylpyrene nucleoside (B-TPY(Do)) as a bare fluorescent probe. The H-bonding/hydrophobic force mediated interactions allow the sensing of all three deformed DNA via an enhancement of fluorescence signal using our simple "Just-Mix and Read" strategy. The binding of the probe to all the three deformed DNA duplexes is accompanied by an increase in the thermal melting stability of the deformed DNAs. That the probe binds efficiently to the minor groove near the deformed site was evident from spectroscopic studies. All the spectral evidences open up a multitude of possibilities for using our probe, tetrazolylpyrene nucleoside, as an efficient fluorescent light-up bio-probe for label free DNA detection.