Comparison of the sequence-dependent fluorescence of the cyanine dyes Cy3, Cy5, DyLight DY547 and DyLight DY647 on single-stranded DNA.

Cyanine dyes are commonly used for fluorescent labeling of DNA and RNA oligonucleotides in applications including qPCR, sequencing, fluorescence in situ hybridization, Förster resonance energy transfer, and labeling for microarray hybridization. Previous research has shown that the fluorescence efficiency of Cy3 and Cy5, covalently attached to the 5' end of single-stranded DNA, is strongly sequence dependent. Here, we show that DY547 and DY647, two alternative cyanine dyes that are becoming widely used for nucleic acid labeling, have a similar pattern of sequence-dependence, with adjacent purines resulting in higher intensity and adjacent cytosines resulting in lower intensity. Investigated over the range of all 1024 possible DNA 5mers, the intensities of Cy3 and Cy5 drop by ∼ 50% and ∼ 65% with respect to their maxima, respectively, whereas the intensities of DY547 and DY647 fall by ∼ 45% and ∼ 40%, respectively. The reduced magnitude of change of the fluorescence intensity of the DyLight dyes, particularly of DY647 in comparison with Cy5, suggests that these dyes are less likely to introduce sequence-dependent bias into experiments based on fluorescent labeling of nucleic acids.