Electronic transport in single-helical protein molecules: Effects of multiple charge conduction pathways and helical symmetry

TL;DR

This paper presents a tight-binding model to study electronic transport in single-helical protein molecules, highlighting their robustness due to helical symmetry and multiple charge pathways, suggesting potential in nanoelectronics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model incorporating helical symmetry and multiple pathways to analyze transport, demonstrating enhanced stability over other biomolecules.

Findings

Transport properties are robust against environmental fluctuations.

Multiple charge pathways and helical symmetry contribute to stability.

Proteins may outperform DNA in nanoelectronic applications.

Abstract

We propose a tight-binding model to investigate electronic transport properties of single helical protein molecules incorporating both the helical symmetry and the possibility of multiple charge transfer pathways. Our study reveals that due to existence of both the multiple charge transfer pathways and helical symmetry, the transport properties are quite rigid under influence of envi- ronmental fluctuations which indicates that these biomolecules can serve as better alternatives in nanoelectronic devices than its other biological counterparts e.g., single-stranded DNA.