DNA-Programmed Nanomaterials and Exploration of Their Chemical Activities

Yan Xiong

DNA-based self-assembly has been developed as an ideal means to create precisely controllable and hierarchical materials from the bottom up due to DNA’s regularity, programmability and addressability. This dissertation demonstrates utilization of the powerful molecular tool to construct 0D, 1D, 2D, and 3D nanomaterials. In the first part of the dissertation, I overview the significance of anisotropic building blocks and discuss how to engineer them in a programmable manner (Chapter 1). I establish a general approach to pattern nanoparticles where DNA nanostructure is employed as a template to transfer prescribed molecular linkers onto an isotropic nanoparticle surface, generating so-called patchy nanoparticle (Chapter 2). I then show the manipulation of nanoscale patches constituted by DNA molecules to fabricate nano-polymeric assemblies (Chapters 3-4). Furthermore, I design...