Gold nanoparticles and DNA : what do we get when they meet ?

The assembly of gold nanoparticle (AuNPs)  and the control of their hierarchical organization in one, two, and three dimension are attracting great current interest for applications such as biomedical sensing and drug delivery.

Using the programmability of DNA base pairing is one of the outstanding approaches of controlled attachment of one nanoparticle to another and showed the ability to build up different AuNPs arrangements from multimer to 3D ordered nanostructures. Here, the self-assembly of gold nanorods (AuNRs) driven by hybridization between ss-DNA linker and DNA-functionalized to AuNRs will be discussed.

Then, I will introduce photon cross-correlation spectroscopy as new method for specific DNA sensing with high sensitivity in a single-step homogeneous solution phase. The approach based on confocal dual-color illumination and detection of the scattering intensities from individual silver nanoparticles and gold nanorods, was fast, quantitative, and simple to operate, making it valuable for bioapplications.