What is it about?
A novel and easy method to decollate giant T4-DNA molecules (166 kbp, with a contour length of 57 μm) with anionic gold nanospheres is reported in this paper. The changes in the physico-chemical properties before and after the interaction were examined through single molecular observations.
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Why is it important?
We have achieved the successful adhesion of anionic gold nanoparticles without any chemical alteration on DNA molecules simply by adding an aliquot of colloidal gold in a mildly warmed DNA solution (60 ºC). The observation of single-molecule with fluorescence microscopy displayed that the decorated DNA molecules becomes more rigid but preserving an elongated conformation and indicated that their spring constant are more than 10 times larger than that of native DNA. The molecular spring constant was evaluated from the analysis of the intra-chain Brownian motion.
Perspectives
This article provides the nice evidence how a simple physical model can be applied to more complex systems (in this case, the spring oscillation to fluctuations of DNA molecules). We expect that the methodology proposed here to obtain the stiffness (spring constant together with damping constant) of DNA will be useful for future researchs in the field of biophysics and physical chemistry.
Professor Kenichi Yoshikawa
Gakko Hojin Doshisha
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Decorating a single giant DNA with gold nanoparticles, RSC Advances, January 2018, Royal Society of Chemistry,
DOI: 10.1039/c8ra05088k.
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