The sbPCVA was performed in two different ways. In the first scheme, we only use the QM energy of the reactant structure and calculate the sensitivity as the difference between the QM energy of the undistorted and the distorted structure (see Fig. shown for a variation of -0.5 per base). Bases A6 and A8 show a very high sensitivity, which was expected since they are adjacent to C7 in the minimal QM region. The sensitivities of the remaining bases in this strand (5'-3') behave nearly distance-dependent. The same behavior could have been expected in the other strand (3'-5') for bases T13 and T15, but those two sensitivities are clearly lower than for example the sensitivities of the more distant bases C11, C12 and A16. These results indicate that the effect of single bases on the QM region is not exclusively distance-dependent.