Dynamics of DNA-Templated Ultrafine Silver Nanowires Formation
Abstract
Recent research on silver nanowires prepared on DNA templates has focused on two fundamental applications: nano-scale circuits and sensors. Despite its broad potential, the formation kinetics of DNA-templated silver nanowires remains unclear. Here, we present an experimental demonstration of the formation of silver nanowires with a diameter of 2.2+0.4 nm at the single-molecule level through chemical reduction. We conducted equilibrium and perturbation kinetic experiments to measure force spectroscopy during the formation of Ag+ -DNA complexes and Ag-DNA complexes, using optical tweezers combined with microfluidics. The addition of AgNO3 resulted in an increase in force of 5.5-7.5 pN within 2 minutes, indicating that Ag+ compacts the DNA structure. In contrast, the addition of hydroquinone caused the force to decrease by 4-5 pN. Morphological characterization confirmed the presence of a dense structure formed by silver atoms bridging the DNA strands, and revealed conformational differences before and after metallization. We compare our experimental data with Brownian dynamics simulations using a coarse-grained double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) model that provides insights on the dependency of the force on the persistence length.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.20913,
title = {Dynamics of DNA-Templated Ultrafine Silver Nanowires Formation},
author = {Qifei Ma and Mauro Chinappi and Ali Douaki and Yanqiu Zou and Huaizhou Jin and Emiliano Descrovi and Roman Krahne and Remo Proietti Zaccaria and Dan Cojoc and Karol Kolataj and Guillermo Acuna and Shangzhong Jin and Denis Garoli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.20913},
year = {2025}
}