Halogenated uracil derivatives are of great interest in modern cancer therapy, either as chemotherapeutics or radiosensitisers depending on their halogen atom. This work applies UV-Vis spectroscopy to study the radiation damage of uracil, 5-bromouracil and 5- uorouracil dissolved in water in the presence of gold nanoparticles upon irradiation with an Nd:YAG ns-pulsed laser operating at 532nm at dierent uences. Gold nanoparticles...

Hypoxia—a hallmark of solid tumors—makes hypoxic cells radioresistant. On the other hand, DNA, the main target of anticancer therapy, is not sensitive to the near UV photons and hydrated electrons, one of the major products of water radiolysis under hypoxic conditions. A possible way to overcome these obstacles to the efficient radio- and photodynamic therapy of cancer is to sensitize the cellular DNA to electrons and/or ultraviolet...

Ab initio quantum calculations for low-energy positron scattering from gas-phase isolated molecular nucleobases which are part of the DNA structure are presented and discussed over the range of 1 eV to 25 eV. The calculations report the integral cross sections (ICSs) and the momentum-transfer cross sections (MTCSs) for Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine. The calculations show very clearly the important role of the dominant...

Degradation mechanism of four brominated nucleobases (BrX), potential DNA radiosensitizers, is studied in explicit water solution, using ab initio molecular dynamics. Several fs long dynamics is needed to localize an electron on the nucleobase. Produced by electron attachment BrX anion radical degrades through the bromide anion abstraction, barrier-free (purines) or with low barrier (pyrimidines), to a reactive nucleobase radical....

We demonstrate here a new class of DNA‐based nanoswitches that, upon enzymatic repair, could undergo a conformational change mechanism leading to a change in fluorescent signal. Such folding‐upon‐repair DNA nanoswitches are synthetic DNA sequences containing O6‐methyl‐guanine (O6‐MeG) nucleobases and labelled with a fluorophore/quencher optical pair. The nanoswitches are rationally designed so that only upon enzymatic demethylation...