Coverage Control of DNA Crystals Grown by Silica Assistance

Molecular Lithography on Silicon Wafers Guided by Porous, Extended Arrays of Small DNA Tiles

Tile-based DNA self-assembly is a cost-effective fabrication method for large-scale nanopatterns. Herein, we report a protocol to directly assemble DNA 2D arrays on silicon wafers and then use the DNA nanostructures as molds to fabricate the corresponding nanostructures on the silicon wafers by hydrogen fluoride (HF) etching. Similar HF etching has been used with robust large DNA origami structures as templates. This work demonstrates that DNA nanostructures assembled from small tiles are sufficiently stable for this process. The resulting feature size (∼8.6 nm) approaches the sizes of e-beam lithography. While the reported method is parallel and inexpensive, e-beam lithography is a serial method and is expensive. We expect that this method will be very useful for preparing fine nanopatterns in large areas.

Site-directed, on-surface assembly of DNA nanostructures

Two-dimensional DNA lattices have been assembled from DNA double-crossover (DX) motifs on DNA-encoded surfaces in a site-specific manner. The lattices contained two types of single-stranded protruding arms pointing into opposite directions of the plane. One type of these protruding arms served to anchor the DNA lattice on the solid support through specific hybridization with surface-bound, complementary capture oligomers. The other type of arms allowed for further attachment of DNA-tethered probe molecules on the opposite side of the lattices exposed to the solution. Site-specific lattice assembly and attachment of fluorophore-labeled oligonucleotides and DNA-protein conjugates was demonstrated using DNA microarrays on flat, transparent mica substrates. Owing to their programmable orientation and addressability over a broad dynamic range from the nanometer to the millimeter length scale, such supramolecular architecture might be used for presenting biomolecules on surfaces, for instance, in biosensor applications.