(413b) Scaling-up Nano-Material Integration with DNA Brick Crystals

De novo design
and assembly of functional nano-materials, especially
those from chemical synthesis and CVD growth, is a key foundation in
nanotechnology and promises diverse applications in photovoltaics,
plasmonics, and electronics. As an example,
nanoparticle-structured floating gate enables fast data reading plus high
information density. However, it is still challenging to integrate the low-dimensional
nano-materials into architectures with both sub-10 nm
uniformity and large-area programmable device architectures.

Recently, in the field of structural DNA
nanotechnology, researchers are using nucleic acids (particularly DNA) to self-assemble
sophisticated synthetic structures at 2-nm resolution in a highly scalable
manner—billions of identical structures assembling simultaneously. One
particular successful strategy is known as single-stranded DNA bricks. By
encoding spatial positioning information into the complementary sequence design,
our lab has constructed more than 100 2D/3D structures from the modular DNA
bricks with the help of computer-aided design software. We further use the modularity
of DNA bricks to engineer DNA brick crystals, micron-sized two-dimensional patterns
with prescribed thickness up to 80 nm and complex 3D surface features.

Using DNA brick crystals
as templates, we demonstrate
the scalable integration of hundred metal nanoparticles into ordered
programmable 2D/3D architectures and chiral surface, ranging from several
hundreds nanometers to microns. Geometrical information of the prescribed
nanoparticle architectures is firstly encoded into the linear sequences of DNA
bricks. Under epitaxial growth condition, a DNA brick crystal is folded with
the expected periodicity over micron scale. Printing gold nanoparticles,
ranging from 5 nm to 30 nm, onto the prescribed positions on the DNA brick crystal
templates through surface DNA hybridization produces the prescribed plasmonic architectures with sub-5 nm positioning precision.

Besides metal nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes (CNT) can
also be aligned onto DNA brick crystals to form micron scale 2D parallel arrays
with prescribed pitch dimensions from around 8 nm to 24 nm at sub-5 nm
positioning precision.

Developing DNA brick crystal-based scaling-up approach
will bridge current synthetic foundation for functional nano-materials
to the emerging nano-electronic applications. By
rational control the structural parameters of DNA brick crystals, the
architecture of the assembled nano-materials can be
de novo designed and reliably fabricated in a scalable manner. High-resolution
feature of DNA brick crystal further scales the positioning resolution of nano-materials to around 2 nm.