Advanced Materials, Vol.21, No.6, 706-706, 2009
Highly Cooperative Behavior of Peptide Nucleic Acid-Linked DNA-Modified Gold-Nanoparticle and Comb-Polymer Aggregates
PNA is used to assemble gold nanoparticle-DNA and polymer-DNA hybrids into highly cooperative aggregates with sharp melting transitions. The melting temperatures of these aggregates are found to increase with increasing salt concentrations, while the opposite trend is observed for unmodified PNA:DNA duplexes. This cooperative behavior is attributed to the presence of closely spaced duplexes inside the aggregate.