“Even though paired bases are connected by weak chemical bonds, it's the interactions that take place without chemical bonds – the interactions between stacked bases – that are much more important for dissipating UV energy.”
“The ability to observe what happens to electronic energy in DNA on such short time scales also extends the hope that methods such as ours can finally determine how DNA is damaged by UV light in the first place.”
“This slow relaxation of energy is utterly different from the mechanism in single bases that transforms the energy into heat in less than a trillionth of a second.”
