Optical conductivity of wet DNA
Soft Condensed Matter
2009-11-11 v2 Other Condensed Matter
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0501610,
title = {Optical conductivity of wet DNA},
author = {A. Huebsch and R. G. Endres and D. L. Cox and R. R. P. Singh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0501610},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures included, final version, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett