A Doorway mechanism for Electron Attachment Induced DNA Strand Break
Abstract
We report a new doorway mechanism for the dissociative electron attachment to genetic materials. The dipole-bound state of the nucleotide anion acts as the doorway for electron capture in the genetic material. The electron gets subsequently transferred to a dissociative {\sigma}* type anionic state localized on a sugar-phosphate or a sugar-nucleobase bond, leading to their cleavage. The electron transfer is mediated by the mixing of electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom. The cleavage rate of the sugar-phosphate bond predicted by this new mechanism is higher than that of the sugar-nucleobase bond breaking, and both processes are considerably slower than the formation of a stable valence-bound anion. The new mechanism explains the relative rates of electron attachment induced bond cleavages in genetic materials.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2106.10518,
title = {A Doorway mechanism for Electron Attachment Induced DNA Strand Break},
author = {Jishnu Narayanan S J and Divya Tripathi and Achintya Kumar Dutta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.10518},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
15 pages, 8 figures