Site-to-site distance distribution in flexible molecules: theoretical evaluation of the donor and/or acceptor fluorescence decay function.

We present the theoretical expression describing dependence of the fluorescence intensity decays on the distance distribution P(r)between energy donors and acceptors in flexible bichromophoric molecules. The expression allows for multiexponential fluorescence decay of the donor- and acceptor-only molecules and takes into account the possibility of incomplete labeling of the molecules by acceptors. It is assumed that the donors and acceptors are static in space and do not move relative to each other during the excited-state lifetime. The potential application of the obtained expression is evaluation of the parameters of the function P(r).