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Electronic Transport in DNA

Physics Department and Centre for Scientific Computing, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Dr. Matthew S. Turner, E-mail: m.s.turner{at}warwick.ac.uk.

We study the electronic properties of DNA by way of a tight-binding model applied to four particular DNA sequences. The charge transfer properties are presented in terms of localization lengths (crudely speaking, the length over which electrons travel). Various types of disorder, including random potentials, are employed to account for different real environments. We have performed calculations on poly(dG)-poly(dC), telomeric-DNA, random-ATGC DNA, and -DNA. We find that random and -DNA have localization lengths allowing for electron motion among a few dozen basepairs only. A novel enhancement of localization lengths is observed at particular energies for an increasing binary backbone disorder. We comment on the possible biological relevance of sequence-dependent charge transfer in DNA.