Direct conductance measurements of short single DNA molecules in dry conditions

作者：Dulic Diana^*; Tuukkanen Sampo; Chung Chia Ling; Isambert Antoine; Lavie Pascal; Filoramo Arianna

来源：Nanotechnology, 2009, 20(11): 115502.

DOI：10.1088/0957-4484/20/11/115502

We present a study of electronic transport in short (12-base-pair) DNA duplexes covalently bonded (via thiol groups) to two gold electrodes obtained by a mechanically controllable break junction (MCJB) technique in dry conditions. A large number of DNA junctions have been repeatedly formed in order to obtain a conductance histogram that reveals a peak which corresponds to the conductance of a single DNA molecule. We observed that the conductivity of a DNA increases upon increasing the content of G: C base pairs in the duplex. With our method we are able to obtain a reliable value of a single DNA conductance and subsequently measure its current-voltage (I-V) characteristics. In contrast to the electronic transport measurements performed with long DNA sequences (hundreds of base pairs) where the obtained conductance values vary a lot with environmental conditions, our values obtained for the short DNA sequences are consistent with the values reported for comparable sequences in aqueous solution.

• 出版日期2009-3-18
• 单位中国地震局