Fabrication of Highly Uniform Conductive Polypyrrole Nanowires with DNA Template

Abstract

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is considered as one of the alternative materials for electronic device applications; however, DNA has critical limitation to electronic device applications due to its low electrical conductivity and unreliability. Therefore, it is required for electronic devices to prepare the well defined conductive polymer nanowires with DNA as a template. Polypyrrole (PPy) is an attractive polymer due to its high conductivity and environmental stability in bulk; although it is well known that ammonium persulfate (APS) used for the polymerization of pyrrole causes the deformation of DNA molecules. We minimized the damage of immobilized DNA strands on (3-aminopropyl) triethoxysilane (APTES) modified silicon wafer during APS polymerization. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) images from different APS treatment times and from using the vortex process obviously showed the effect on the synthesis of individual and continuous polypyrrole nanowires (PPy NWs). The PPy NWs at various pyrrole concentrations had similar height; however, the higher concentration gave more residues. Fourier transform-infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) spectroscopy provided the strong evidence that PPy NWs were successfully synthesized on the DNA strands.