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Melamine may have been an important prebiotic information carrier, but its excited-state dynamics, which determine its stability under UV radiation, have never been characterized. The ability of melamine to withstand the strong UV radiation present on the surface of the early Earth is likely to have affected its abundance in the primordial soup. Here, we studied the excited-state dynamics of melamine (a proto-nucleobase) and its lysine derivative (a proto-nucleoside) using the transient absorption technique with a UV pump, and UV and infrared probe pulses. For melamine, the excited-state population decays by internal conversion with a lifetime of 13 ps without coupling significantly to any photochemical channels. The excited-state lifetime of the lysine derivative is slightly longer (18 ps), but the dominant deactivation pathway is otherwise the same as for melamine. In both cases, the vast majority of excited molecules return to the electronic ground state on the aforementioned time scales, but a minor population is trapped in a long-lived triplet state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early evolution of life, 8-oxo-7,8-dihydro-2'-deoxyguano-sine (O) may have functioned as a proto-flavin capable of repairing cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers in DNA or RNA by photoinduced electron transfer using longer wavelength UVB radiation. To investigate the ability of O to act as an excited-state electron donor, a dinucleotide mimic of the FADH2 cofactor containing O at the 5-end and 2-deoxyadenosine at the 3-end was studied by femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy in aqueous solution. Following excitation with a UV pulse, a broadband mid-IR pulse probed vibrational modes of ground-state and electronically excited molecules in the double-bond stretching region. Global analysis of time-and frequency-resolved transient absorption data coupled with ab initio quantum mechanical calculations reveal vibrational marker bands of nucleobase radical ions formed by electron transfer from O to 2-deoxyadenosine. The quantum yield of charge separation is 0.4 at 265 nm, but decreases to 0.1 at 295 nm. Charge recombination occurs in 60 ps before the O radical cation can lose a deuteron to water. Kinetic and thermodynamic considerations strongly suggest that all nucleobases can undergo ultrafast charge separation when n-stacked in DNA or RNA. Interbase charge transfer is proposed to be a major decay pathway for UV excited states of nucleic acids of great importance for photostability as well as photoredox activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]