Conformation dependent electronic transport in a DNA double-helix

TL;DR

This study explores how the conformation of DNA double-helix influences its electronic transport properties, revealing that structural variations can induce metallic, semiconducting, or insulating behavior, aligning with experimental observations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a tight-binding model incorporating helical symmetry to analyze conformation-dependent electronic transport in DNA, providing new insights into its phase behavior.

Findings

Localization length increases with DNA radius

DNA can exhibit metallic, semiconducting, or insulating phases

Backbone energy affects I-V response and phase behavior

Abstract

In this work we report the study of conformation dependent electronic transport properties of DNA double-helix within tight-binding framework including its helical symmetry. We have studied the changes in localization properties of DNA as we alter the number of stacked bases within a pitch of the double-helix keeping the total number of nucleotides in the DNA chain fixed. We take three DNA sequences, two of them are periodic and one is random and observe that localization length increases as we increase the radius of DNA double-helix i.e., number of nucleotides within a pitch. We have also investigated the effect of backbone energetic on the I-V response of the system and we find that in presence of helical symmetry, depending on the interplay of conformal variation and disorder strength DNA can be found in either metallic or semiconducting and even in an insulating phase, which in turn successfully explain all the experimental findings by a single model.