How the intercalation of phenanthroline affects the structure, energetics, and bond properties of DNA base pairs: theoretical study applied to adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine tetramers.

The effects of phenanthroline (phen) intercalation on the structure, energetics, and bonding of adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine tetramers (A-T/T-A and G-C/C-G) were studied through density functional theory (DFT) using functionals that were recently improved to consider the effect of dispersion forces. Our results given by energy decomposition analysis show that the dispersion contribution, ΔEdisp, is the most important contribution to the interaction energy, ΔEint. However, it is not enough to compensate the Pauli repulsion term, ΔEPauli, and the roles of the orbital contribution, ΔEorb, and, in particular, the electrostatic contribution, ΔEelstat, become crucial for the stabilization of the structures in the intercalation process. On the other hand, for G-C/C-G systems, hydrogen-bonding (HB) interactions are more important than stacking (S) interactions, whereas for A-T/T-A systems, HB and S become competitive. Moreover, intercalation produces important changes not only in the hydrogen bonds of base pairs, because S and HB are deeply connected, but also in other characteristic geometric parameters of the base pairs.