Optical seminar | 18 January 2024

A longstanding goal of material scientists is to fabricate functional materials in which nanoscale objects are precisely positioned on macroscale surfaces. This can be achieved by a combination of bottom-up techniques, such as molecular self-assembly of DNA origami, and top-down lithographic methods. Through DNA origami placement (DOP) on lithographically patterned surfaces a variety of nanoscale components such as organic dyes, proteins or nanoparticles, have already been patterned on large-scale arrays [1, 2]. However, any DOP methods developed so far were limited to two-dimensional DNA origami structures and thus resulted in flat patterns and arrays only. Here we extend DOP to the third dimension through positioning of three-dimensional DNA origami onto nanometer-precise patterns over micro- and even millimeter scales [3]. We demonstrate that our method can produce surfaces nanotextured with three-dimensional hybrid DNA-silica structures with controllable heights up to 50 nm and a feature size down to ~ 6 nm. We believe that the presented strategy can be used for the assembly of a wide range of materials from metals and semiconductors to functional biomolecules arranged in virtually any three-dimensional geometry on large-scale substrates. 

[1] R. Kershner, Nat Nanotechnol (2009) 

[2] A. Gopinath, et al., Nature (2016) 

[3] I. Martynenko et al., Nat Nanotechnol (2023)