Nucleotide correlations and electronic transport of DNA sequences

Abstract

We use a tight-binding formulation to investigate the transmissivity and wave-packet dynamics of sequences of single-strand DNA molecules made up from the nucleotides guanine G , adenine A , cytosine C , and thymine T . In order to reveal the relevance of the underlying correlations in the nucleotides distribution, we compare the results for the genomic DNA sequence with those of two artificial sequences: (i) the Rudin-Shapiro one, which has long-range correlations; (ii) a random sequence, which is a kind of prototype of a short-range correlated system, presented here with the same first-neighbor pair correlations of the human DNA sequence. We found that the long-range character of the correlations is important to the persistence of resonances of finite segments. On the other hand, the wave-packet dynamics seems to be mostly influenced by the short-range correlations.