Kinetics of receptor directed assembly of multisegment nanowires

We demonstrate the receptor directed end-to-end assembly of multisegment Au/Ni/Au nanowires under agitation in ethanol. The gold end-segments were functionalized with biotin-terminated thiol thereby restricting aggregation to end-to-end attachment via an avidin linkage. On mixing biotin-terminated nanowires with avidin-terminated nanowires, the average chain length is shown to increase linearly with time. The rate constant was independent of the nanowire concentration. Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations were used to model the self-assembly process, and we show that the directed end-to-end assembly of nanowires is similar to the polycondensation of linear polymers.