Chemically Fueled Plasmon Switching of Gold Nanorods by Single-Base Pairing of Surface-Grafted DNA.

The interactions between metal ions and biomolecules are crucial to various bioprocesses. Development of plasmon switching nanodevices that exploit these molecular interactions is of fundamental and technological interest. Here, we show plasmon switching based on rapid aggregation/dispersion of double-stranded DNA-modified gold nanorods (dsDNA-AuNRs) that exhibit colloidal behaviors depending on pairing/unpairing of the terminal bases. The dsDNA-AuNRs bearing a thymine-thymine (T-T) mismatch at the penultimate position undergo spontaneous non-cross-linking aggregation in the presence of Hg2+ due to T-Hg-T base pairing. Inversely, the subsequent addition of cysteine (Cys) gives rise to the removal of Hg2+ from the T-Hg-T base pair to reproduce the T-T mismatch, resulting in stable dispersion of the dsDNA-AuNRs. The chemical-responsive plasmon switch allows for the rapid and repeatable cycles at room temperature. The validity of the present method is further exemplified by developing another plasmon switch fueled by Ag+ and Cys by installing the Ag+-binding DNA sequence in the dsDNA-AuNR.