Metal–insulator transition in DNA molecules induced by long-range correlations in the sequence of nucleotides

Abstract

Abstract We propose an analytical approach for calculation of the electron localization length in the DNA molecules. In the fishbone model the localization length is directly related to the binary correlation function of the sequence of nucleotides. Application of the proposed method to some known DNA sequences shows sharp maxima in the energy dependence of the localization length. These maxima can be considered as mobility edges. Existence of the mobility edge is rather rare event and it requires that the correlation function apart from an inverse power law decay, also oscillates as a function of the distance between the nucleotides. Although many DNA sequences exhibit slow decay of correlations, only very few of them possess the mobility edge. It is not clear yet what is the biological role of the mobility edge.