Saturday, 26 January, 2008
Gold NanoStoves for Microsecond DNA Melting Analysis
J. Stehr, C. Hrelescu, R.A. Sperling, G. Raschke, M. Wunderlich, A. Nichtl, D. Heindl, K. Kürzinger, W.J. Parak, T.A. Klar, and J. Feldmann -
Nano Lett. 10.1021 (2008)
In traditional DNA melting assays, the temperature of the DNA-containing solution is slowly ramped up. In contrast, we use 300 ns laser pulses to rapidly heat DNA bound gold nanoparticle aggregates. We show that double-stranded DNA melts on a microsecond time scale that leads to a disintegration of the gold nanoparticle aggregates on a millisecond time scale. A perfectly matching and a point-mutated DNA sequence can be clearly distinguished in less than one millisecond even in a 1:1 mixture of both targets.