Electronic transport and localization in short and long DNA

Abstract

The question of whether DNA conducts electric charges is intriguing to physicists and biologists alike. The suggestion that electron transfer/transport in DNA might be biologically important has triggered a series of experimental and theoretical investigations. Here, we review recent theoretical progress by concentrating on quantum-chemical, molecular dynamics-based approaches to short DNA strands and physics-motivated tight-binding transport studies of long or even complete DNA sequences. In both cases, we observe small, but significant differences between specific DNA sequences such as periodic repetitions and aperiodic sequences of AT bases, lambda-DNA, centromeric DNA, promoter sequences as well as random-ATGC DNA.