Transverse Electronic Transport through DNA Nucleotides with Functionalized Graphene Electrodes

Abstract

Graphene nanogaps and nanopores show potential for the purpose of electrical DNA sequencing, in particular because single-base resolution appears to be readily achievable. Here, we evaluated from first principles the advantages of a nanogap setup with functionalized graphene edges. To this end, we employed density functional theory and the non-equilibrium Green's function method to investigate the transverse conductance properties of the four nucleotides occurring in DNA when located between the opposing functionalized graphene electrodes. In particular, we determined the electrical tunneling current variation as a function of the applied bias and the associated differential conductance at a voltage which appears suitable to distinguish between the four nucleotides. Intriguingly, we observe for one of the nucleotides a negative differential resistance effect.

19 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (13)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• Graphene: A sub-nanometer trans-electrode membrane
• Electron beam nanosculpting of suspended graphene sheets
• Physical approaches to DNA sequencing and detection
• Room-temperature gating of molecular junctions using few-layer graphene nanogap electrodes
• DNA nucleotide-specific modulation of μA transverse edge currents through a metallic graphene nanoribbon with a nanopore
• Transverse conductance of DNA nucleotides in a graphene nanogap from first principles
• Origin of negative differential resistance in a strongly coupled single molecule-metal junction device
• Functionalized nanopore-embedded electrodes for rapid DNA sequencing
• Enhanced DNA sequencing performance through edge-hydrogenation of graphene electrodes
• First-principles study of high conductance DNA sequencing with carbon nanotube electrodes
• Graphene Nanogap for Gate Tunable Quantum Coherent Single Molecule Electronics
• Aviram-Ratner rectifying mechanism for DNA base pair sequencing through graphene nanogaps

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Silicene as a new ultrafast DNA sequencing device
• Recent progress in atomistic simulation of electrical current DNA sequencing
• Nucleobase-functionalized graphene nanoribbons for accurate high-speed DNA sequencing
• ssDNA sequencing by rectification
• Graphene nanopore devices for DNA sequencing: A tight-binding model study
• Field effect and local gating in nitrogen-terminated nanopores (NtNP) and nanogaps (NtNG) in graphene