Organizing Gold Nanoparticles with DNA

We have used a robust DNA motif to organize two different sizes of gold nanoparticles with DNA. The motif is shown below. Panel (a) is a schematic of the motif, and panel (b) shows a molecular drawing.

This motif spans 3-space. The two helices in each direction can be hooked together by double cohesion. However, we have put sticky ends on only two of the directions, and the third direction is used to house the gold nanoparticle.

The figure below shows how we can use two different species of this motif to organize different arrangements of nanoparticles.

The TEM image below shows that we can actually achieve these arrangements. The image in (a) corresponds to the top arrangement in (b) above, the image in (b) corresponds to the middle arrangement above and the image in (c) corresponds to the bottom image in (b) above.

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