Ultrathin gold nanowires with diameters of 1.8 nm were obtained by reduction of Au(I) to Au(0) in oleylamine-AuCl complexes through decomposition of the oleylamine polymeric strands, using silver nanoparticles as catalyst. It was found that the resulting nanowires were made of pure gold with an average length of 2 μm. [29,30]
However, the transfer of nanowires from solution onto a substrate in a controlled manner represents an extremely challenging task, mainly due to inter-wire aggregation. 1D and 2D architectures of gold-containing nanorods have been accomplished by means of scaffolding structures such as DNA [33,44,45] or biopolymer templates [33,46], by electric field alignment, [33,47] liquid crystal assembly, [33,48] self-assembly from microemulsion, [34,37,49] and scanning probe manipulation. [50–52] In this regard, atomic force microscopy of nanorods is a powerful but slow tool for controlling both the size of the final 1D array and the placement of nanorods on a substrate. [50]
Herein, we report a new DNA nanomachine-driven reversible nano-shield strategy for circumventing this problem. The basic idea is based on the fact that the conformational change of surface-attached DNA nanomachines will cause the variation of the exposed surface active area on metal nanoparticles. As a proof-of-concept study, we immobilized G-rich DNA strands on gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) which have glucose oxidase (GOx) like activity.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0195859
The rabbit hole goes deep.
Gold nanowires.
Nanomachines?
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14402
Only science fiction?
Aliens love gold nanoparticles.