Alivisatos A P, Johnsson K P, Peng X, Wilson T E, Loweth C J, Bruchez M P, Schultz P G
Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley, 94720, USA.
Nature. 1996 Aug 15;382(6592):609-11. doi: 10.1038/382609a0.
Patterning matter on the nanometre scale is an important objective of current materials chemistry and physics. It is driven by both the need to further miniaturize electronic components and the fact that at the nanometre scale, materials properties are strongly size-dependent and thus can be tuned sensitively. In nanoscale crystals, quantum size effects and the large number of surface atoms influence the, chemical, electronic, magnetic and optical behaviour. 'Top-down' (for example, lithographic) methods for nanoscale manipulation reach only to the upper end of the nanometre regime; but whereas 'bottom-up' wet chemical techniques allow for the preparation of mono-disperse, defect-free crystallites just 1-10 nm in size, ways to control the structure of nanocrystal assemblies are scarce. Here we describe a strategy for the synthesis of 'nanocrystal molecules', in which discrete numbers of gold nanocrystals are organized into spatially defined structures based on Watson-Crick base-pairing interactions. We attach single-stranded DNA oligonucleotides of defined length and sequence to individual nanocrystals, and these assemble into dimers and trimers on addition of a complementary single-stranded DNA template. We anticipate that this approach should allow the construction of more complex two- and three-dimensional assemblies.
在纳米尺度上对物质进行图案化是当前材料化学和物理学的一个重要目标。这一目标的驱动力既包括进一步缩小电子元件尺寸的需求，也包括在纳米尺度下材料特性强烈依赖尺寸且因此可被灵敏调控这一事实。在纳米晶体中，量子尺寸效应和大量表面原子会影响其化学、电子、磁学和光学行为。用于纳米尺度操控的“自上而下”方法（例如光刻法）仅能达到纳米尺度范围的上限；而“自下而上”的湿化学技术虽能制备出尺寸仅为1至10纳米的单分散、无缺陷微晶，但控制纳米晶体聚集体结构的方法却很稀少。在此，我们描述了一种合成“纳米晶体分子”的策略，其中基于沃森 - 克里克碱基配对相互作用，将离散数量的金纳米晶体组装成空间定义的结构。我们将具有确定长度和序列的单链DNA寡核苷酸连接到单个纳米晶体上，在加入互补单链DNA模板后，这些纳米晶体可组装成二聚体和三聚体。我们预计这种方法应能实现更复杂的二维和三维组装体的构建。
