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Published on: December 3, 2015
A pH-responsive DNA nanomachine-controlled catalytic assembly of gold nanoparticles
Dongbao Yao1, Hui Li, Yijun Guo
1CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry, iChEM (Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials), Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, P. R. China. xiaosy@ustc.edu.cn hjliang@ustc.edu.cn.
Abstract:
The toehold-mediated DNA-strand-displacement reaction has unique programmable properties for driving the catalytic assembly of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). Herein, we introduced a pH-responsive triplex structure into the DNA-strand-displacement-based catalytic assembly system of DNA-AuNPs to add an additional controlling factor, namely the pH. In this catalytic system, the aggregation rate of AuNPs could be regulated by both internal factors (concentrations of substrate, target, etc.) and an external control (pH gradient). This strategy can be used to construct pH-induced DNA logic gates and sophisticated DNA networks as well as to image instantaneous pH changes in living cells.
