Sequence dependence of fluorescence emission and quenching of doubly thiazole orange labeled DNA: effective design of a hybridization-sensitive probe

We have designed a doubly thiazole orange labeled nucleoside showing high fluorescence intensity for a hybrid with the target DNA and effective quenching for a single-stranded state. Knowing how much the fluorescence emission and quenching of this probe depend on the probe sequence and why there is such a sequence dependence is important for effective probe design, we synthesized more than 30 probe sequences and measured their fluorescence intensities. When the probe hybridized with the target DNA strands, there was strong emission, whereas the emission intensity was much weaker before hybridization; however, self-dimerization of probes suppressed fluorescence quenching. In particular, the G/C base pairs neighboring the labeled nucleotide in a self-dimeric structure resulted in a low quenching ability for the probe before hybridization. On the other hand, mismatched base pair formation around the labeled site decreased the fluorescence intensity because the neighboring sequence is the binding site of the tethered thiazole orange dyes. The hybridization enhanced the fluorescence of the probe even when the labeled nucleotide was located at the end of the probe strand; however, the partial lack of duplex structure resulted in a decrease in the fluorescence intensity of the hybrid.