Optical conductivity of wet DNA

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments we have studied the optical conductivity of DNA in its natural environment containing water molecules and counter ions. Our density functional theory calculations (using SIESTA) for four base pair B-DNA with order 250 surrounding water molecules suggest a thermally activated doping of the DNA by water states which generically leads to an electronic contribution to low-frequency absorption. The main contributions to the doping result from water near DNA ends, breaks, or nicks and are thus potentially associated with temporal or structural defects in the DNA.

arXiv comment4 pages, 4 figures included, final version, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (4)

• Selfconsistent order-N density-functional calculations for very large systems
• Linear-scaling ab-initio calculations for large and complex systems
• Electronic signature of DNA nucleotides via transverse transport
• Dipole relaxation losses in DNA

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• Aviram-Ratner rectifying mechanism for DNA base pair sequencing through graphene nanogaps