Arrays of Nanoarrays: Elements of Binding

摘要

The development of strategies for the robust attachment of organized patterns of nanostructures to a variety of surfaces has been a major objective of this laboratory. One of the significant impediments to single molecule, as opposed to multiple molecule, attachment arises from the size gap or intrinsic mismatch between the size of readily obtainable “top down” nanostructures and the native size scale of the molecules of interest. Although binding structures of diameter significantly less than 100 nm can certainly be fabricated, the techniques required to generate them are not widely available to researchers and the failure rate for the production of such structures is relatively high. These concerns have motivated this laboratory to instead pursue the synthesis of adapter structures which bridge, or partially bridge, this size gap by increasing the effective footprint of a single DNA molecule.