Estimation of the number of nucleotides with thymine in deoxyribonucleic acid by far-infrared absorption

Abstract

A new research trend that regards deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as a new dielectric polymeric material has been emerging in recent years. Especially for such application purposes, a simple easy-to-use method for determining the higher-order structure of synthetic DNA is desirable. From this viewpoint, we demonstrated in this research that far-infrared absorption spectroscopy can be a tool to determine the DNA higher-order structure and we calculated experimentally the integrated molar absorption coefficients per nucleotide with thymine at various frequencies. Therefore, using these coefficients, the number of thymine base on a single stranded DNA can be estimated by far-infrared spectroscopy.