Northwestern researchers have shown that improving the interaction strength of DNA (Improving Crystal Engineering with DNA) can improve the engineering of colloidal crystals to improve their use in creating many functional nanomaterials, according to a study recently published in ACS Nano.
Chad Mirkin, PhD, Professor of Medicine in the Department of Hematology and Oncology, George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology, is leading the study.
Colloidal crystal engineering in DNA involves converting nanoparticles into potential atomic equivalents, or “PAEs”, which are used to create colloidal crystals that can be used to engineer synthetic DNA sequences.
Later this method focuses on control of the sizes and the crystals, even the cryst of crystal is, it can separate the crystals, nucleior and taste.
“The new crystallers can be realized in this process, so the small crystal can start all the time, and you will be connected to the same number of people in the crystals. So trying to separate those two events, growth from initial crystal formation, was the problem we wanted to solve,” said Kaitlin Landy, a doctoral student in the Department of Chemistry at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and co-lead . author of the study.
In the study, Mirkin’s team explored how the interaction force (Improving Crystal Engineering with DNA) of DNA can be used to separate nucleation and growth in colloidal crystallization.
To do this, the group has produced two of the calculated nanoparticles: Many people have the “fruit” that does not make “taste”.
“So you can make your first clock, then, a young person who is growing in addition to Mixkin’s lab and author of birth.
Using this method, the investigator is better to be a place to be a crystals. They can also select the nanoparticle and DNA shell structures themselves and mix and match them, allowing them to incorporate a variety of materials into the crystal.
“One thing that we think is very powerful is continuing to think about how we can follow these processes [crystallization] using different types of particles,” added Gibson.
“This process can be used to create these interesting core-shell structures in a single step, which previously required many steps in the pre-synthetic synthesis of the first crystal before the second step,” said Landy. “With the strength of these two different interactions of DNA, if we can name where the different types of particles go in the final structure, it is useful to investigate these basic questions.”
