Arrays of Nanoarrays: Elements of Binding

The development of strategies for the robust attachment of organized patterns of nanostructures to a variety of surfaces has been a major objective of this laboratory. One of the significant impediments to single molecule, as opposed to multiple molecule, attachment arises from the size gap or intrinsic mismatch between the size of readily obtainable ldquotop downrdquo nanostructures and the native size scale of the molecules of interest. Although binding structures of diameter significantly less than 100 nm can certainly be fabricated, the techniques required to generate them are not widely available to researchers and the failure rate for the production of such structures is relatively high. These concerns have motivated this laboratory to instead pursue the synthesis of adapter structures which bridge, or partially bridge, this size gap by increasing the effective footprint of a single DNA molecule. Although several different approaches to the generation of adapter structures are under parallel development in the laboratory, one is based on a totally synthetic polydentate macromolecule. In this paper, the merits of this multithiol system will be presented. The development of an experimental platform for the characterization of attachment sites and adapter structure/attachment site interactions will also be described. These platforms are compatible with a wide range of characterization methods, including scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, laser scanning confocal microscopy, scanning tunneling electron microscopy and near field scanning optical microscopy, which can be used to evaluate these structures over the macro/micro/nano size range.