DNA has become one of the most extensively used molecular building blocks for engineering self-assembling materials. DNA origami is a technique that uses hundreds of short DNA oligonucleotides, called staple strands, to fold a long single-stranded DNA, which is called a scaffold strand, into various designer nanoscale architectures. DNA origami has dramatically improved the complexity and scalability of DNA nanostructures. Due to its high degree of customization and spatial addressability, DNA origami provides a versatile platform with which to engineer nanoscale structures and devices that can sense, compute, and actuate. These capabilities open up opportunities for a broad range of applications in chemistry, biology, physics, material science, and computer science that have often required programmed spatial control of molecules and atoms in three-dimensional (3D) space. This review provides a comprehensive survey of recent developments in DNA origami structure, design, assembly, and directed self-assemb...

DNA Origami: Scaffolds for Creating Higher Order Structures

Metal-halide perovskites have rapidly emerged as one of the most promising materials of the 21st century, with many exciting properties and great potential for a broad range of applications, from photovoltaics to optoelectronics and photocatalysis. The ease with which metal-halide perovskites can be synthesized in the form of brightly luminescent colloidal nanocrystals, as well as their tunable and intriguing optical and electronic properties, has attracted researchers from different disciplines of science and technology. In the last few years, there has been a significant progress in the shape-controlled synthesis of perovskite nanocrystals and understanding of their properties and applications. In this comprehensive review, researchers having expertise in different fields (chemistry, physics, and device engineering) of metal-halide perovskite nanocrystals have joined together to provide a state of the art overview and future prospects of metal-halide perovskite nanocrystal research.

State of the Art and Prospects for Halide Perovskite Nanocrystals.

Many naturally occurring biomolecules, such as amino acids, sugars and nucleotides, are inherently chiral. Enantiomers, a pair of chiral isomers with opposite handedness, often exhibit similar physical and chemical properties due to their identical functional groups and composition, yet show different toxicity to cells. Detecting enantiomers in small quantities has an essential role in drug development to eliminate their unwanted side effects. Here we exploit strong chiral interactions with plasmonic metamaterials with specifically designed optical response to sense chiral molecules down to zeptomole levels, several orders of magnitude smaller than what is typically detectable with conventional circular dichroism spectroscopy. In particular, the measured spectra reveal opposite signs in the spectral regime directly associated with different chiral responses, providing a way to univocally assess molecular chirality. Our work introduces an ultrathin, planarized nanophotonic interface to sense chiral molecules with inherently weak circular dichroism at visible and near-infrared frequencies.

Chirality detection of enantiomers using twisted optical metamaterials

Plasmonic biosensing has been used for fast, real-time, and label-free probing of biologically relevant analytes, where the main challenges are to detect small molecules at ultralow concentrations and produce compact devices for point-of-care (PoC) analysis. This review discusses the most recent, or even emerging, trends in plasmonic biosensing, with novel platforms which exploit unique physicochemical properties and versatility of new materials. In addition to the well-established use of localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR), three major areas have been identified in these new trends: chiral plasmonics, magnetoplasmonics, and quantum plasmonics. In describing the recent advances, emphasis is placed on the design and manufacture of portable devices working with low loss in different frequency ranges, from the infrared to the visible.

Plasmonic Biosensing Focus Review

Biological materials are self-assembled with near-atomic precision in living
cells, whereas synthetic 3D structures generally lack such precision and
controllability. Recently, DNA nanotechnology, especially DNA origami
technology, has been useful in the bottom-up fabrication of well-defined
nanostructures ranging from tens of nanometres to sub-micrometres. In this
Primer, we summarize the methodologies of DNA origami technology, including
origami design, synthesis, functionalization and characterization. We highlight
applications of origami structures in nanofabrication, nanophotonics and
nanoelectronics, catalysis, computation, molecular machines, bioimaging, drug
delivery and biophysics. We identify challenges for the field, including size
limits, stability issues and the scale of production, and discuss their
possible solutions. We further provide an outlook on next-generation DNA
origami techniques that will allow in vivo synthesis and multiscale
manufacturing.

DNA origami

Circular dichroism spectra of naturally occurring molecules and also of synthetic chiral arrangements of plasmonic particles often exhibit characteristic bisignate shapes. Such spectra consist of peaks next to dips (or vice versa) and result from the superposition of signals originating from many individual chiral objects oriented randomly in solution. Here we show that by first aligning and then toggling the orientation of DNA-origami-scaffolded nanoparticle helices attached to a substrate, we are able to reversibly switch the optical response between two distinct circular dichroism spectra corresponding to either perpendicular or parallel helix orientation with respect to the light beam. The observed directional circular dichroism of our switchable plasmonic material is in good agreement with predictions based on dipole approximation theory. Such dynamic metamaterials introduce functionality into soft matter-based optical devices and may enable novel data storage schemes or signal modulators.

/pdf/chiral-plasmonic-dna-nanostructures-with-switchable-circular-3la9j5karj.pdf

Chiral plasmonic DNA nanostructures with switchable circular dichroism

Surface plasmon enhanced second harmonic generation in gold grating slabs was investigated. The efficiency is analyzed with respect to the phase matching at the fundamental and the second harmonic frequencies. A classical electromagnetic model was developed under the weak nonlinearity approximation and solved by the finite element method. The measured zeroth order transmitted second harmonic intensity was found to be in quantitative agreement with numerical results. It is shown experimentally and numerically that proper phase matching at both frequencies improves the second harmonic efficiency.

/pdf/phase-matching-for-surface-plasmon-enhanced-second-harmonic-403c4fphgg.pdf

Ngoc Luong

Papers

Chiral plasmonic DNA nanostructures with switchable circular dichroism

Phase matching for surface plasmon enhanced second harmonic generation in a gold grating slab