  Motivated by recent experiments we have studied the optical conductivity of
DNA in its natural environment containing water molecules and counter ions. Our
density functional theory calculations (using SIESTA) for four base pair B-DNA
with order 250 surrounding water molecules suggest a thermally activated doping
of the DNA by water states which generically leads to an electronic
contribution to low-frequency absorption. The main contributions to the doping
result from water near DNA ends, breaks, or nicks and are thus potentially
associated with temporal or structural defects in the DNA.
