The thermal reorganization of DNA immobilized at the silica/buffer interface: a vibrational sum frequency generation investigation.

We have monitored the interactions of DNA strands immobilized on silica at the buried solid/liquid interface using vibrational sum frequency generation. We find that the nucleobases exhibit net order even prior to hybridization for immobilized single strands. Moreover, varying the temperature of the hybridized samples leads to spectral changes from the thymine nucleobases that are consistent with duplex dissociation.