Abstract
The use of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) oligonucleotides has proven to be a powerful and versatile strategy to assemble nanomaterials into two (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) superlattices. With the aim of contributing to the elucidation of the factors that affect the stability of this type of superlattices, the assembly of gold nanoparticles grafted with different DNA oligonucleotides was characterized by UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy as a function of temperature. After establishing an appropriate methodology the effect of (i) the length of the grafted oligonucleotides; (ii) the length of their complementary parts and also of (iii) the simultaneous grafting of different oligonucleotides was investigated. Our results indicate that the electrostatic repulsion between the particles and the cooperativity of the assembly process play crucial roles in the stability of the assemblies while the grafting density of the oligonucleotide strands seems to have little influence.
Highlights
Many efforts have been devoted over recent years to the production of both two (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) superlattices of metallic, insulating or semiconducting nanoparticles [1,2,3].These lattices can be considered as artificial crystals in which nanocrystals take the place of the atomsPolymers 2013, 5 in traditional crystals
The AuNP were functionalized with different oligonucleotides according to procedures described in the literature [22] which leads to an 8 nm hypsochrome shift of the Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) band
If the temperature ramp is inverted immediately, which is the case for the data reported in Figure 2, the absorbance first decreases slightly due to some additional precipitation but when the oligonucleotides start to unpair, the particles dissociate and are redispersed which leads to a sharp increase of the absorbance to its initial value
Summary
Many efforts have been devoted over recent years to the production of both two (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) superlattices of metallic, insulating or semiconducting nanoparticles [1,2,3]. The use of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) oligonucleotides has proven to be a powerful and versatile strategy, developed since the mid-1990s [13,14], to assemble nanomaterials This strategy takes advantage of the remarkable properties of these biomolecules, i.e., the pairing selectivity and specificity of the DNA oligonucleotides, and the regular helical structure of double stranded DNA. The linker strategy is used in most of the studies devoted to superlattices formation; it introduces additional parameters (linker concentration, nucleotidic sequence of the linker, etc.) which further complicates the comparison of the stability of the assemblies with that of the free oligonucleotides. We report here on the effect of different experimental parameters and of different characteristics of the grafted nucleotide sequences on the stability of assemblies
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