Fragment charge difference method for estimating donor–acceptor electronic coupling: Application to DNA π-stacks

The purpose of this communication is two-fold. We introduce the fragment charge difference (FCD) method to estimate the electron transfer matrix element HDA between a donor D and an acceptor A, and we apply this method to several aspects of hole transfer electronic couplings in π-stacks of DNA, including systems with several donor–acceptor sites. Within the two-state model, our scheme can be simplified to recover a convenient estimate of the electron transfer matrix element HDA=(1−Δq2)1/2(E2−E1)/2 based on the vertical excitation energy E2–E1 and the charge difference Δq between donor and acceptor. For systems with strong charge separation, Δq≳0.95, one should resort to the FCD method. As favorable feature, we demonstrate the stability of the FCD approach for systems which require an approach beyond the two-state model. On the basis of ab initio calculations of various DNA related systems, we compared three approaches for estimating the electronic coupling: the minimum splitting method, the generalized Mulliken–Hush (GMH) scheme, and the FCD approach. We studied the sensitivity of FCD and GMH couplings to the donor–acceptor energy gap and found both schemes to be quite robust; they are applicable also in cases where donor and acceptor states are off resonance. In the application to π-stacks of DNA, we demonstrated for the Watson–Crick pair dimer [(GC),(GC)] how structural changes considerably affect the coupling strength of electron hole transfer. For models of three Watson–Crick pairs, we showed that the two-state model significantly overestimates the hole transfer coupling whereas simultaneous treatment of several states leads to satisfactory results.