Migliore and Collaborators re-ignite interest in DNA-based wires

Dr Agostino Migliore and collaborators are taking a major step forward in understanding the basic rules of charge transport through long polymer  wires and in their implementation in more complex electrical circuits. Their work recently appeared in Nature Nanotechnology and is a result of an international collaboration led by the experimental group of Prof. Danny Porath (from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and involving experimentalists and theorists from Israel, USA, and Europe. The experiments in the paper, ”Long-range charge transport in single G-quadruplex DNA molecules”, provide a reliable and controllable platform for measuring currents through polymer wires on hard substrate and highlight the stability and good performance of guanine-quadruplex DNA conduction. The theory achieves unprecedented agreement with the experiment and as such provides deep insights into the possible mechanism governing transport in these molecular wires. The results of this work are expected to re-ignite interest in the use of DNA-based wires for designing programmable circuits.