Multi-component DNA-templated nanowires: Characterization of the mechanism of formation

One dimensional anisotropic nanostructures are of great interest for many fields, such as physics, engineering, chemistry and biology. For example, in the biomedical area, researchers are interested in studying these one-dimensional structures for applications in nano-sized biosensors. Nano-scaled biosensors can improve in detection sensitivity and selectivity. Currently, mass production of nanowires is limited due to the lack of control in reproducibility. Bottom-up approach for nanowire fabrication has shown to be feasible and inexpensive. Therefore, we are interested in studying nanowire formation through the linear assembly of cationic coated nanoparticles on DNA strands. The mechanism of nanowire formation is discussed by obtained results from circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy. Restriction and ligase enzymes were utilized to study the process of biomolecular manipulation of the nanowire structure. The formation of multi-component DNA template nanowires assembled with magnetic and metallic nanoparticles were examined and characterized through magnetic force microscopy (MFM) and CD. The results presented from this study provide significant information on the efficiency of DNA templating for single- and multi-component nanowires