Twist-4 Gluon Recombination Corrections for Deep Inelastic Structure Functions

We calculate twist--4 coefficient functions for the deep inelastic structure function $F_2(x,Q^2)$ associated to 4--gluon operator matrix elements for general values of the Bjorken variable $x$ and study the numerical effect on the slope $\partial F_2(x,Q^2)/\partial \log Q^2$. It is shown that these contributions diminish the strongly rising twist--2 terms towards small values of $x$.