Insights into electron tunneling across hydrogen-bonded base-pairs in complete molecular circuits for single-stranded DNA sequencing

We report a first-principles study of electron ballistic transport through a molecular junction containing deoxycytidine-monophosphate (dCMP) connected to metal electrodes. A guanidinium ion and guanine nucleobase are tethered to gold electrodes on opposite sides to form hydrogen bonds with the dCMP molecule providing an electric circuit. The circuit mimics a component of a potential device for sequencing unmodified single-stranded DNA. The molecular conductance is obtained from DFT Green's function scattering methods and is compared to estimates from the electron tunneling decay constant obtained from the complex band structure. The result is that a complete molecular dCMP circuit of 'linker((CH2)(2))-guanidinium-phosphate-deoxyribose-cytosine-guanine' has a very low conductance (of the order of fS) while the hydrogen-bonded guanine-cytosine base-pair has a moderate conductance (of the order of tens to hundreds of nS). Thus, while the transverse electron transfer through base-pairing is moderately conductive, electron transfer through a complete molecular dCMP circuit is not. The gold Fermi level is found to be aligned very close to the HOMO for both the guanine-cytosine base-pair and the complete molecular dCMP circuit. Results for two different plausible geometries of the hydrogen-bonded dCMP molecule reveal that the conductance varies from fS for an extended structure to pS for a slightly compressed structure.