In this letter, we study the structure-transport property relationships of small ligand intercalated DNA molecules using a multiscale modelling approach where extensive ab-initio calculations are performed on numerous MD-simulated configurations of dsDNA and dsDNA intercalated with two different intercalators, ethidium and daunomycin. DNA conductance is found to increase by one order of magnitude upon drug intercalation due to the local unwinding of the DNA base pairs adjacent to the intercalated sites which leads to modifications of the density-of-states in the near-Fermi energy region of the ligand-DNA complex. Our study suggests that the intercalators can be used to enhance/tune the DNA conductance which opens new possibilities for their potential applications in nanoelectronics.
@article{arxiv.2012.06147,
title = {Fine-tuning the DNA conductance by intercalation of drug molecules},
author = {Abhishek Aggarwal and Anil Kumar Sahoo and Saientan Bag and Veerabhadrarao Kaliginedi and Manish Jain and Prabal K. Maiti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.06147},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
This work is under review at Physical Review Letters