Far-infrared Absorption of Deoxyribonucleic Acid with Thymine

Abstract

Recently, attempts to use deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as an industrially important substance have been emerging. For that purpose, easy and convenient determination of the higher-order structure of DNA is desirable. In this research, we measured far-infrared absorption spectra of various synthetic single stranded DNAs, each with an identical base in its nucleotides, and found that DNAs with different bases exhibit different spectra. We also demonstrated that the number of thymine bases on a single stranded DNA can be estimated from the spectra.