The lineshape of the electronic spectrum of the green fluorescent protein chromophore, part I: gas phase.

Abstract

In this work we present the vibrationally resolved optical absorption spectrum of p-hydroxybenzylidene-2,3-dimethylimidazolinone (HBDI), the green fluorescent protein (GFP) chromophore, computed at several levels of theory, including time-dependent DFT with various functionals and basis sets, CASSCF, CASPT2 and XMCQDPT2. We also investigated what happens to the spectrum if the ground- and excited-state geometries are optimized at different levels of theory (mixed approach), as has been used previously. The vibrationally resolved absorption spectra obtained by DFT, CASPT2 and XMCQDPT2 are very similar and consist of a main absorption peak and a shoulder that is ∼1500 cm(-1) higher in energy. The vibrational progression increases moderately with temperature. These spectra are in qualitative agreement with experimental action spectra, but much narrower and lack the long tail in the blue, even at high temperatures. Because our calculated emission spectra, which are equally narrow, are in good agreement with the emission of green fluorescent protein at 253 K, we argue that the action spectrum are too broad to be considered as the absorption spectrum. The CASSCF method and the mixed approaches overestimate the vibrational progressions with respect to CAM-B3LYP, CASPT2 and XMCQDPT2, due to inaccuracies in the geometric S0 →S1 displacements. Finally, we computed the vibronic spectra of four chromophore analogues with different substitutions on the rings and found that these substitutions hardly affect the lineshape in vacuum.