Encoding Morphogenesis of Quasi-Triangular Gold Nanoprisms with DNA.

Abstract

Properties of gold nanoparticles vary with their morphologies. Typically, the research on the properties and applications of the nonequilibrium intermediates generated by the morphological evolution of triangular gold nanoprisms is still incomplete. Herein, we employ thiol-DNA (HS-DNA) to protect the low-stability quasi-nanoprisms with different truncation degrees (R values). The presence of HS-DNA not only increases the stability of the quasi-nanoprisms in different microenvironments, but also facilitates us to investigate their intrinsic plasmonic properties related to morphology. Additionally, we serve quasi-nanoprisms loaded with HS-DNA as assembly modules and nanoplatforms for programmable self-assembly higher-order hybrid structures, as well as carriers for encoding and decoding of orthogonal barcode-like information, which opens new opportunities for developing novel building blocks for light manipulation at nanoscale.