Sequence-independent helical wrapping of single-walled carbon nanotubes by long genomic DNA

Because of their nanometer sizes and molecular recognition capabilities, biological systems have garnered much attention as vehicles for the directed assembly of nanoscale materials.(1-6) One of the greatest challenges of this research has been to successfully interface biological systems with electronic materials, such as semiconductors and metals. As a means to address some of these issues, Sarikaya, Belcher, and others have used a combinatorial technique called phage display(7-9) to discover new families of peptides that showed binding affinities to various substrates. More recently, Zheng and co-workers used combinatorial DNA libraries to isolate short DNA oligomers (30-90 bases) that could disperse single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) in water.(10) Through a systematic analysis, they found that short oligonucleotides having repeating sequences of gunanines and thymines (dGdT)(n) could wrap in a helical manner around a CNT with periodic pitch.(11) Although helix formation around SWCNTs having regular pitches is an effective method for dispersing and separating CNTs, the need for specific repeating sequences limits use to non-natural DNA that must be synthesized with optimal lengths of less than 150 bases. In contrast, we demonstrate here that long genomic single-stranded DNA (>>100 bases) of a completely random sequence of bases can be used to disperse CNTs efficiently through the single-stranded DNA's (ssDNA) ability to form tight helices around the CNTs with distinct periodic pitches. Although this process occurs irrespective of the DNA sequence, we show that this process is highly dependent on the removal of complementary strands. We also demonstrate that although the helix pitch-to-pitch distances remain constant down the length of a single CNT, the distances are variable from one DNA-CNT to another. Finally, we report initial work that shows that methods developed to align long dsDNA can be applied in a similar fashion to produce highly dense arrays of aligned ssDNA-CNT hybrids.