BIOPHYSICAL THEORY AND MODELING |
Electronic Transport in DNA
Katerina Daphne Klotsa 1, Rudolf Andreas Roemer 2 and Matthew S Turner 2*
1 University of Nottingham
2 University of Warwick
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: m.s.turner{at}warwick.ac.uk.
Submitted on April 6, 2005
Revised on May 10, 2005
Accepted on 7 June 2005
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Abstract |
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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 localisation 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 lambda-DNA. We find that random and lambda-DNA have localisation lengths allowing for electron motion among a few dozen base pairs only. A novel enhancement of localisation 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.
Key Words:
DNA, conductivity, localization, quantum, repair, transport
