Is Dna an Electrical Conductor

Is Dna an Electrical Conductor?

Viewpoint: Yes, DNA is an electrical conductor, despite inconsistent experimental results and disagreement about how it conducts.

Viewpoint: No, experiments have not conclusively proved that DNA is an electrical conductor; furthermore, there is no universally accepted definition of a wire conductor at the molecular level.

In 1941, long before the historic determination of the double helix structure of DNA by James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin, Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Nobel laureate biochemist who had discovered Vitamin C, proposed that some biological molecules might exhibit a form of electrical conductivity. This proposal was based on the observation that x-ray damage—the knocking out of an electron by an x ray—at one part of a chromo-some could result in a mutation in a gene located some distance away through motion of the electrons in the molecule. As the structure and genetic function of DNA became understood, it seemed natural to expect that the proposed conductivity would be found in the DNA molecule itself.

DNA, the fundamental information storage molecule in all self-reproducing life-forms, is an interesting polyatomic assembly in its own right. DNA is not, however, a single compound, but rather a family of polymeric molecules in which strands of alternating deoxyribose and phosphate groups carrying purine and pyrimidine bases are (at low temperatures and in an aqueous medium at the right pH and ionic strength) bound to strands bearing complementary base sequences.

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