Ding Baoquan group of the National Center for nanoscience has made new progress in using self-assembly structure to control surface chemical reactions to construct nanomaterial patterns

Surface interface chemical reaction is a physical and chemical process occurring at the interface between two phases of substances By limiting the conformation, orientation and selectivity of reactants, the active center and rate of chemical reaction can be controlled, which plays an important role in physical chemistry and related fields The patterned preparation of metals and metal oxides provides the basis for the construction of nano catalysis system and optical and electronic devices Therefore, it is of great significance to guide the growth of metals and metal oxides by surface chemical reactions and complex patterning Because of its powerful programmability, DNA nanostructures can be designed into two-dimensional and three-dimensional nanostructures, which encode a lot of physical and chemical information, and provide an effective platform for revealing and regulating surface chemical processes By using the surface addressability of DNA nanostructures, the precise assembly and controllable growth of inorganic nanomaterials can be realized At present, there are two main methods to realize the growth and assembly of inorganic metal materials based on DNA nanotechnology: one is to realize the in-situ growth of metals on DNA nanostructures by electrostatic adsorption of metal cations based on the negatively charged phosphoric acid group on DNA skeleton and subsequent reduction reaction Due to the fact that the DNA skeleton is full of phosphate groups, this method lacks of addressability and can not realize the site controlled growth of nanomaterials; secondly, based on the principle of DNA base complementary, through the functionalization of metal nanomaterials surface, the controllable self-assembly of metal nanomaterials at the upper site of DNA structure can be realized Due to the limited kinds of metals that can realize functionalization, some metals can not realize the location assembly on DNA nanostructures in this way, and a large number of by-products will be produced at the same time Therefore, there is an urgent need for a new method to realize the growth of DNA self-assembled nano materials Ding Baoquan group of the National Center for nanoscience proposed a new strategy to realize the site controlled growth of various metals and metal oxides on the surface of DNA nanostructures This method uses the strong coordination between sulfhydryl and many metals to arrange the site-specific DNA extension chain with sulfhydryl on the DNA origami structure By introducing the metal precursor, on the surface of the DNA nanostructure, it preferentially and selectively adsorbs on the sulfhydryl site After the subsequent oxidation-reduction reaction, it can realize the growth of patterned customized metals and metal oxides The method can realize the localization and controllable growth of palladium, cobalt, nickel, silver, gold and Fe2O3 nanoclusters And the principle of this method can be extended to other groups which have strong interaction with metal, so as to expand the types of metal and oxide which can be grown by controlled location This method provides a new strategy for accurately patterned metal and metal oxide growth, and can greatly promote the development of customized functional nanostructures The research results were published in J am Chem SOC (J am Chem SOC 2019, 141, 17968-17972) under the title of "precision organization of metal and metal oxide nanoclusters into binary patterns on DNA origin" Li Na, assistant researcher of the National Center for nanoscience, and Shang Yingxu, Ph.D graduate student, are the co first authors of the paper, and Ding Baoquan, the corresponding author, is the researcher The research was supported by NSFC, science fund of innovation research team and key research program of Frontier Science of Chinese Academy of Sciences.