Quantum mechanical treatment of binding energy between DNA nucleobases and carbon nanotube: A DFT analysis

• DFT calculations were performed to evaluate the binding energy between DNA nucleobases and carbon nanotube.
• Effect of initial configuration on the binding energy was investigated.
• Different initial configurations can lead to different binding energy values.
• More importantly, the order of the binding energy with respect to the four DNA nucleobases also depends on the initial configuration.

The interactions between DNA and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been widely studied in recent years. The binding process of DNA with CNT as well as the electronic properties of DNA/CNT hybrids constitutes an interesting yet complicated problem. The binding energy (BE) of the hybridization is one of the most extensively studied parameters for the problem. In this work, density functional theory (DFT) was used to perform geometry optimization of neutral nucleobases including adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine absorbed on a zigzag (7,0) single-walled CNT and to evaluate the basis set superposition error corrected BE of the optimized configuration. All DFT calculations were performed using the M05-2X functional. The 6-31G(d) basis set was used for the optimization step and single point energy calculations were done using the 6-31G(d,p) basis set. For each nucleobase, we examined the influence of the initial configuration (IC) on the BE value. In particular, we considered 24 different ICs for each nucleobase, and each IC was subjected to an independent optimization and BE calculation. Our results showed that different ICs result in very different BE values and can even change the order of the BE corresponding to different nucleobases. The difference in the BE for a particular nucleobase caused by changes in its IC can be comparable to the difference in the BE between different nucleobases at the same initial position relative to the CNT. This provides an explanation for the discrepancies that exist in the literature on the nucleobase/CNT BE, and suggests that the potential energy surface between the nucleobases and the CNT can have many local minima and care should be exercised in the calculation and interpretation of the BE.