Tacrine-pyrimidine photoactive molecular hybrids: Synthesis, photophysics, docking and BSA interaction study

Abstract This study reports the synthesis of two photoactive molecular hybrids containing Tacrine and pyrimidine moieties achieved by multicomponent reaction. The hybrids 11a and 11b present absorption maxima close to the Tacrine absorption (~320 nm). The hybrids present fluorescence emission around 400 nm, as observed for the separate Tacrine and pyrimidine structures. Time-resolved fluorescence indicates for 11a and 11b a monoexponential time decay around 1.5 ns. In this sense, the variation on the size of the aliphatic linker between both fluorophores seems not to affect the observed photophysical properties of the hybrids. In addition, the interaction of the compounds with bovine serum albumin (BSA) in phosphate buffer solution (PBS) was investigated, where a suppression mechanism was observed for both molecular hybrids. Docking was also performed to better understand the observed suppression mechanism.