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Spectroscopic studies of nucleic acid additions during seed-mediated growth of gold nanoparticles

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Abstract

The effect of adding nucleic acids to gold seeds during the growth stage of either nanospheres or nanorods was investigated using UV–Vis spectroscopy to reveal any oligonucleotide base or structure-specific effects on nanoparticle growth kinetics or plasmonic signatures. Spectral data indicate that the presence of DNA duplexes during seed aging drastically accelerated nanosphere growth while the addition of single-stranded polyadenine at any point during seed aging induces nanosphere aggregation. For seeds added to a gold nanorod growth solution, single-stranded polythymine induces a modest blue shift in the longitudinal peak wave length. Moreover, a particular sequence comprised of 50% thymine bases was found to induce a faster, more dramatic blue shift in the longitudinal peak wave length compared to any of the homopolymer incubation cases. Monomeric forms of the nucleic acids, however, do not yield discernable spectral differences in any of the gold suspensions studied.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding support of GT-AFOSR BIONIC Center of Excellence (FA9550-09-1-0162) and AFRL/RX. M.T. also acknowledges support of a NIH Training Grant (T32, NIBIB, T32EB006343-02), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and a GAANN Fellowship. Flow cytometry studies were carried out at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) Core Lab facilities. TEM characterization was carried out in the Center for Nanostructure Characterization at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, 30332-0245, USA

    Maeling J. N. Tapp, Richard S. Sullivan & Valeria T. Milam

  2. Materials & Manufacturing Directorate, Soft Matter Materials Branch, Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio, 45433, USA

    Patrick Dennis & Rajesh R. Naik

  3. Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, 30332-0245, USA

    Valeria T. Milam

  4. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, 30332-0245, USA

    Valeria T. Milam

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  1. Maeling J. N. Tapp
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Correspondence to Valeria T. Milam.

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To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/jmr.2014.409. TEM micrographs and additional UV-Vis spectra of nanoparticle suspensions (PDF).

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Tapp, M.J.N., Sullivan, R.S., Dennis, P. et al. Spectroscopic studies of nucleic acid additions during seed-mediated growth of gold nanoparticles. Journal of Materials Research 30, 666–676 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2014.409

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