Fluorescence lifetime measurements can be made on the decay of individual 'frozen' conformers of tryptophan analogs in supersonic gas expansions. These measurements have shown differences in single exponential lifetimes among conformers of a given analog, results which are strongly consistent with the presence of conformation-dependent charge transfer quenching. For jet cooled tryptophan, however, one of the conformers emits from ¹L_a, thereby complicating any interpretation of the results. To remove this problem we considered tryptophan analogs with C-5 substituents, in which all the jet cooled conformers emit from ¹L_b. We observed differences in conformer lifetimes similar to cases considered earlier. In the course of this work we discovered that, in contrast to tryptophan, 5- methoxytryptophan shows single exponential decay in solution. Based on additional data for jet cooled samples, we propose the most likely explanation to be substituent induced changes in conformer geometries and populations.

Date Published: 17 August 1994
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 2137, Time-Resolved Laser Spectroscopy in Biochemistry IV, (17 August 1994); doi: 10.1117/12.182746

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2137:
Time-Resolved Laser Spectroscopy in Biochemistry IV
Joseph R. Lakowicz, Editor(s)