BioWires: Conductive DNA Nanowires in a Computationally-Optimized, Synthetic Biological Platform for Nanoelectronic Fabrication

Abstract: DNA is an ideal template for a biological nanowire-it has a linear structure several atoms thick; it possesses addressable nucleobase geometry that can be precisely defined; and it is massively scalable into branched networks. Until now, the drawback of DNA as a conducting nanowire been, simply put, its low conductance. To address this deficiency, we extensively characterize a chemical variant of canonical DNA that exploits the affinity of natural cytosine bases for silver ions. We successful…