The role of water on the electronic transport in graphene nanogap devices designed for DNA sequencing

Abstract Innovative methodologies for reliably and inexpensively sequencing DNA can lead to a new era of personalized medicine. In this work, we performed a theoretical investigation of a nanogap-based all electronic DNA sequencing device. To do so, we used a nitrogen-terminated nanogap on a graphene sheet with the aqueous environment fully taken into account. Our investigation is performed using a hybrid methodology combining quantum and classical mechanics coupled to non-equilibrium Green's functions for solving the electron transport across the device. The obtained results show that the DNA nucleotides can be both detected and distinguished in such device, which indicates that it can be used as a DNA sequencing device providing very high sensitivity and selectivity. Furthermore, our results show that water plays a major role in electronic transport in nanoscopic tunneling devices, not only from an electrostatics point of view, but also by providing states that significantly increase the conductance in nanogap-based DNA sequencing devices.