Coverage Control of Silica-Assisted Grown DNA Crystals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a surface-assisted method to precisely control the coverage of DNA nanostructures on silica surfaces, enabling their integration into electronic and photonic devices, and reveals how electrostatic interactions induce novel crystal formations.

Contribution

It presents a new fabrication scheme for controlling DNA nanostructure coverage on silica surfaces and explores the resulting topological changes due to electrostatic interactions.

Findings

Controlled DNA coverage from 0 to 100% on silica surfaces.

Electrostatic interactions cause dramatic topological changes.

Potential applications in electronics and photonics.

Abstract

One of the main goals of DNA nanotechnology is to provide a viable solution to the limitations of top-down approaches in microfabrication schemes. Although a completely practical bottom-up approach is yet to be realized, there has been great progress in integrating the two approaches in the past few years. In this vein, we present a novel surface assisted fabrication scheme able to directly control the coverage rate, from 0 to 100%, of functionalized DNA nanostructures on centimeter-scaled silica (SiO_2) substrates which is one key to harnessing DNA's unique properties in electronics and photonics. Furthermore, electrostatic interactions between the DNA structures and the surface lead to dramatic topological changes of the structures, creating novel formations of the crystals. These results provide a direct route to applying fully functionalized layers of DNA nanostructures to current technologies in SiO_2-based electronics and photonics.