Electronic structure and spectroscopy of nucleic acid bases: ionization energies, ionization-induced structural changes, and photoelectron spectra

We report high-level ab initio calculations and single-photon ionization mass spectrometry study of ionization of adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). For thymine and adenine, only the lowest-energy tautomers were considered, whereas for cytosine and guanine we characterized the five lowest-energy tautomeric forms. The first adiabatic and several vertical ionization energies were computed using the equation-of-motion coupled-cluster method for ionization potentials with single and double substitutions. Equilibrium structures of the cationic ground states were characterized by DFT with the ωB97X-D functional. The ionization-induced geometry changes of the bases are consistent with the shapes of the corresponding molecular orbitals. For the lowest-energy tautomers, the magnitude of the structural relaxation decreases in the following series, G > C > A > T, the respective relaxation energies being 0.41, 0.32, 0.25, and 0.20 eV. The computed adiabatic ionization energies (8.13, 8.89, 8.51-8.67, and 7.75-7.87 eV for A, T, C, and G, respectively) agree well with the onsets of the photoionization efficiency (PIE) curves (8.20 ± 0.05, 8.95 ± 0.05, 8.60 ± 0.05, and 7.75 ± 0.05 eV). Vibrational progressions for the S(0)-D(0) vibronic bands computed within double-harmonic approximation with Duschinsky rotations are compared with previously reported experimental photoelectron spectra and differentiated PIE curves.