Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2011
Properly designed sequences of oligonucleotides can be employed as scaffolds or templates for the self-organization of nanostructures and devices, through the Watson-Crick base pairing mechanism which serves as a programmable smart glue. In this paper, we report the Platinum metallization of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) sequences for the first time. PNA is an analogue of DNA and has a neutral backbone which provides stronger hybridization, greater stability and higher specificity in base pairing. Pt ions were reduced from a salt solution and localized over the PNA fragments where the size of the Pt colloids depends on the duration of chemical reduction. Computations of the high lying occupied and lowlying unoccupied orbitals indicated that Pt nanoparticles bind easily on both the Thymine (T) bases and the backbone in the PNA.