Recently, professor Tian's research group at College of Engineering and Applied sciences of Nanjing University had made a breakthrough in using three different shapes of octahedral DNA origami structures to programmably realize a variety of DNA origami crystal templates, and further induced gold nanoparticles to successfully obtain 38 highly ordered superlattice structures. The related work was published on Science Advances on November 23, 2022 with the title of “A universal way to enrich the nanoparticle lattices with polychrome DNA origami “homologs””.
DNA origami has strong designability and is good at carrying guest particles, so it is often used in the research of nanoparticle assembly. However, in the current field of nanoparticle superlattices, researchers are often only able to fabricate DNA origami crystal templates by using a single shaped origami structure to realize nanoparticle crystallization, resulting in finite types of origami crystal templates, which greatly limits the types of available nanoparticle crystals. Therefore, further enriching the origami crystal templates is a necessary prerequisite to achieve more distinct nanoparticle superlattices.
Figure 1. Schematic diagram of nanoparticle superlattice construction using three octahedral DNA origami with different shapes
In this work, we flexibly took advantage of the programmability of DNA origami technology, and synthesized three octahedral DNA origami structures with different shapes, namely regular octahedron (R_oct), elongated octahedron (E_oct) and partially elongated octahedron (P_oct). The vertices of these octahedral origami DNA “homologues” can extend specific sticky ends to meet the specific connections between the monomers during assembly, enabling the construction of multiple DNA crystal templates. In addition, due to the unique cavity structure of the origami structure used in this work and the multi-unit design of the DNA crystal templates, we can selectively anchor the gold nanoparticles inside the specified origami to prepare different types of nanoparticle superlattices. In this work, we realized the construction of 85 kinds of composite superlattices (considering DNA origami and nanoparticles) and 38 kinds of nanoparticle superlattices (considering only nanoparticles), which greatly enriched the database of superlattices and laid a solid foundation for the preparation of functional devices with special properties later.
Figure 2. Scanning electron microscopy characterization of nanoparticle superlattices constructed from different DNA origami crystal templates
Dr. Min Ji and Dr. Zhaoyu Zhou from Nanjing University are the co-first authors of the paper, and Professor Ye Tian from College of Engineering and Applied sciences of Nanjing University is the corresponding author of the paper. Professor Weigao Xu from School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Nanjing University provided important guidance for this work. The State Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Life Science of Nanjing University, National Laboratory of Solid Microstructures of Nanjing University, Jiangsu Key Laboratory ofArtificial Functional Materials,Chemistry, and Biomedicine Innovation Center of Nanjing University, Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Chemistry, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures provided important platform support for the smooth development of this work. We would like to thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Program for Innovative Talents and Entrepreneur in Jiangsu for their support. In addition, Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai (NFPS) also gave important technical support to this research.
Paper linkage:https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adc9755.
