https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-024-05681-3
Regular Article
Amplificative–dissipative tunneling: the problem of genetic mutation
São Carlos Institute of Physics, Av. Trab. São Carlense, 400, São Carlense, Brazil
a
hugo.sanchezdearaujo@gmail.com
Received:
17
July
2024
Accepted:
19
September
2024
Published online:
9
October
2024
Genetic mutations are one of the most important topics to understand both adaptive changes to preserve species and relevant aspects in the genetic code that lead from genetic syndromes to cancers. The occurrence of mutations is connected with proton transfer between hydrogen bonds, leading to tautomerism (anomalous nitrogenous base pairs formation) inside DNA molecule. Here, we present an extended spin–boson open quantum system approach to the proton tunneling in hydrogen bonds. Our spin–boson model accounts for the action of two counteracting baths: an attenuating reservoir describing the nucleus environment and an amplifying anti-reservoir representing external sources of radiation. In our description, the genetic mutation mechanism is modeled by an H–bond proton in an asymmetric double–well potential, whose lower and upper levels represent DNA canonical and tautomeric states, respectively. The spin–boson model is most suitable for describing the tautomerism problem since its tunneling mechanism between canonical and tautomeric states naturally describes the spontaneous mutations in the absence of any interactions of the proton with its surroundings. In addition to dissipation that is known to attenuate the proton tunneling probability to protect the DNA strands, we take into account external sources of radiation that naturally raise the tunneling rate. Our extended spin–boson approach has also supported an alternative biochemical analysis of tautomerism based on the equilibrium constant of the proton transfer reaction to estimate the number of spontaneous and induced tautmeric base pairs in DNA.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
