Hydrogen exchange in nucleosides and nucleotides. Measurement of hydrogen exchange by stopped-flow and ultraviolet difference spectroscopy.

Time-dependent changes in the ultraviolet absorbance of the adenine chromophore are observed in the stopped-flow spectrophotometer when adenosine and its analogs are rapidly transferred from protium oxide to deuterium oxide. These absorbance changes are shown to result from hydrogen exchange in the exocyclic amino groups of the purine ribonucleosides by using derivatives of adenosine in which methyl groups replace exchangeable hydrogens and by showing that the general characteristics of hydrogen exchange in adenosine analogs agree with those found here. A study of the dependence of hydrogen-exchange rate constants on adenosine, AMP, and phosphate concentration showed there is a second-order dependence on AMP concentration which is primarily due to intermolecular catalysis by the phosphate group of the nucleotide. The deuterium oxide perturbation difference spectrum, obtained at equilibrium, was found to contain two components that result from blue shifts of the adenine chromophore absorbance: (1) a shift cause by the substitution of deuterium for protium in the ring (N1) nitrogen and exocyclic nitrogens, and (2) a shift associated with a change in the polarizability of the medium. Since the theory of solvent perturbation, which is used to measure the relative "exposure" of chromophores in macromolecules, assumes that the spectral shifts observed are solely due to (2) above, the use of deuterium oxide as a measure of chromophore exposure to perturbants the size of water must be reexamined.