Gold Nanoparticles

Chemical engineers at McGill University in Montreal have reported a means for making nanoparticles that have high fidelity targeting for specific proteins on cancer cells. The structure consists of gold particles with single stranded DNA sequences that amount to transient scaffolds for delivering a therapeutic or imaging chemical to cell surfaces. They describe their work as “ a molecular printing strategy that chemically transfers a discrete pattern of DNA strands from a three-dimensional DNA structure to a gold nanoparticle. We show that the particles inherit the DNA sequence configuration encoded in the parent template with high fidelity. This provides control over the number of DNA strands and their relative placement, directionality and sequence asymmetry. Importantly, the nanoparticles produced exhibit the site-specific addressability of DNA nanostructures, and are promising components for energy, information and biomedical applications.   MORE

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