A recent study by researchers from Peking University highlights the potential of nuclear electric resonance to control the nuclear spins of nitrogen atoms in DNA using electric field gradients. This breakthrough suggests that DNA could one day be manipulated for computational purposes.
By combining molecular dynamics simulations, quantum chemical calculations, and theoretical analyses, the study reveals how electric field gradients interact with nitrogen atoms in DNA, encoding both genetic and structural information through nuclear spin orientations.
The findings were published recently in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal, in an open-access article titled “Encoding Genetic and Structural Information in DNA Using Electric Field Gradients and Nuclear Spins.”
“Our research has unveiled the patterns of the principal axis directions of the electric field gradient at the nitrogen atom sites in DNA molecules, demonstrating that these directions are closely associated with the types of bases and the 3D structure of DNA,” the authors said. Essentially, the nuclear spin orientations of nitrogen atoms store information about both DNA’s sequence and its 3D form. This insight opens the door to the possibility of using DNA as a data storage system in quantum computing.
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