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Molecular rectifiers with very high rectification ratio enabled by oxidative damage in double-stranded DNA

In this work, we report a novel strategy to construct molecular diodes with a record tunable rectification ratio of as high as 10^6 using oxidatively damaged DNA molecules. Being exposed to several endogenous and exogenous events, DNA suffers constant oxidative damages leading to oxidation of guanine to 8-Oxoguanine (8oxoG). Here, we study the charge migration properties of native and oxidatively damaged DNA using a multiscale multiconfigurational methodology comprising of molecular dynamics, density functional theory and kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. We perform a comprehensive study to understand the effect of different concentrations and locations of 8oxoG in a dsDNA sequence on its CT properties and find tunable rectifier properties having potential applications in molecular electronics such as molecular switches and molecular rectifiers. We also discover the negative differential resistance properties of fully oxidized Drew-Dickerson sequence. The presence of 8oxoG guanine leads to the trapping of charge, thus operates as a charge sink, which reveals how oxidized guanine saves the rest of the genome from further oxidative damage.