Bidentate surface structures of glycylglycine on Si(111)7×7 by high-resolution scanning tunneling microscopy: site-specific adsorption via N-H and O-H or double N-H dissociation

Surface-Mediated Hydrogen Bonding of Proteinogenic α-Amino Acids on Silicon

Understanding the adsorption, film growth mechanisms, and hydrogen bonding interactions of biological molecules on semiconductor surfaces has attracted much recent attention because of their applications in biosensors, biocompatible materials, and biomolecule-based electronic devices. One of the most challenging questions when studying the behavior of biomolecules on a metal or semiconductor surface is "What are the driving forces and film growth mechanisms for biomolecular adsorption on these surfaces?" Despite a large volume of work on self-assembly of amino acids on single-crystal metal surfaces, semiconductor surfaces offer more direct surface-mediated interactions and processes with biomolecules. This is due to their directional surface dangling bonds that could significantly perturb hydrogen bonding arrangements. For all the proteinogenic biomolecules studied to date, our group has observed that they generally follow a "universal" three-stage growth process on Si(111)7×7 surface. This is supported by corroborating data obtained from a three-pronged approach of combining chemical-state information provided by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and the site-specific local density-of-state images obtained by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) with large-scale quantum mechanical modeling based on the density functional theory with van der Waals corrections (DFT-D2). Indeed, this three-stage growth process on the 7×7 surface has been observed for small benchmark biomolecules, including glycine (the simplest nonchiral amino acid), alanine (the simplest chiral amino acid), cysteine (the smallest amino acid with a thiol group), and glycylglycine (the smallest (di)peptide of glycine). Its universality is further validated here for the other sulfur-containing proteinogenic amino acid, methionine. We use methionine as an example of prototypical proteinogenic amino acids to illustrate this surface-mediated process. This type of growth begins with the formation of a covalent-bond driven interfacial layer (first adlayer), followed by that of a transitional layer driven by interlayer and intralayer hydrogen bonding (second adlayer), and then finally the zwitterionic multilayers (with intralayer hydrogen bonding). The important role of surface-mediated hydrogen bonding as the key for this universal three-stage growth process is demonstrated. This finding provides new insight into biomolecule-semiconductor surface interactions often found in biosensors and biomolecular electronic devices. We also establish the trends in the H-bond length among different types of the hydrogen bonding for dimolecular structures in the gas phase and on the Si(111)7×7 surface, the latter of which could be validated by their STM images. Finally, five simple rules of thumb are developed to summarize the adsorption properties of these proteinogenic biomolecules as mediated by hydrogen bonding, and they are expected to provide a helpful guide to future studies of larger biomolecules and their potential applications.

Self-directed growth of aligned adenine molecular chains on Si(111)7×7: direct imaging of hydrogen-bond mediated dimers and clusters at room temperature by scanning tunneling microscopy

The early stage of adsorption of adenine on Si(111)7×7 is studied by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Bright protrusions are observed in both empty-state and filled-state STM images, indicative of molecular adsorption of adenine through dative bonding. The majority of these bright protrusions appear as dimer pairs formed by hydrogen bonding at the initial adsorption stage. The formation of dative bonds between the substrate and adenine and the feasibility of the H-bond mediated dimers are supported by ab initio DFT/B3LYP/6-31G++(d,p) calculations, and are in excellent accord with our recent X-ray photoemission data. Remarkably, these dimers are found to undergo self-organization into aligned superstructures, evidently with common link arrangements, including straight, offset, and zigzag chains, square quartets, double quartets, and other multiple dimer structures. As the exposure of adenine increases, the populations of dimers as well as the self-organized double dimer and other higher-order structures also increase. The end-to-end dimer links are found to be most prominent in the growth of adenine molecular chains, most notably aligned along the Si dimer-wall or [-1 1 0] direction of the 7×7 unit cell. The self-aligned adenine dimer molecular chains offer a natural template for catch-and-release biosensing, lithography, and molecular electronic applications.