title: Toward Self-Assembled Plasmonic Devices: High-Yield Arrangement of Gold Nanoparticles on DNA Origami Templates.
abstract: Plasmonic structures allow the manipulation of light with materials that are smaller than the optical wavelength. Such structures can consist of plasmonically active metal nanoparticles and can be fabricated through scalable bottom-up self-assembly on DNA origami templates. To produce functional devices, the precise and high-yield arrangement of each of the nanoparticles on a structure is of vital importance as the absence of a single particle can destroy the functionality of the entire device. Nevertheless, the parameters influencing the yield of the multistep assembly process are still poorly understood. To overcome this deficiency, we employed a test system consisting of a tubular six-helix bundle DNA origami with binding sites for eight oligonucleotide-functionalized gold nanoparticles. We systematically studied the assembly yield as a function of a wide range of parameters such as ionic strength, stoichiometric ratio, oligonucleotide linker chemistry, and assembly kinetics by an automated high-throughput analysis of electron micrographs of the formed heterocomplexes. Our optimized protocols enable particle placement yields up to 98.7% and promise the reliable production of sophisticated DNA-based multiparticle plasmonic devices for applications in photonics, optoelectronics, and nanomedicine.
authors.affiliation: Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), Technische Universität Dresden , 01062 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: Fatih N
authors.initials: FN
authors.lastname: Gür
authors.affiliation: Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), Technische Universität Dresden , 01062 Dresden, Germany.|B CUBE - Center for Molecular Bioengineering, Technische Universität Dresden , 01307 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: Friedrich W
authors.initials: FW
authors.lastname: Schwarz
authors.affiliation: Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), Technische Universität Dresden , 01062 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: Jingjing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ye
authors.affiliation: Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), Technische Universität Dresden , 01062 Dresden, Germany.|B CUBE - Center for Molecular Bioengineering, Technische Universität Dresden , 01307 Dresden, Germany.|Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics , 01307 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Diez
authors.affiliation: Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), Technische Universität Dresden , 01062 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: Thorsten L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Schmidt
mesh_terms: D004247:DNA / Q000737:chemistry*; D004261:DNA Replication; D006046:Gold; D053768:Metal Nanoparticles; D055095:Optics and Photonics
chemical_list: D006046:Gold; D004247:DNA
keywords: DNA nanotechnology; DNA origami; automated image analysis; gold nanoparticles; plasmonic waveguides; plasmonics