Nanoscale Growth and Patterning of Inorganic Oxides Using DNA Nanostructure Templates

Sumedh P. Surwade †, Feng Zhou †, Bryan Wei ‡§,Wei Sun ‡§, Anna Powell †, Christina O’Donnell †,Peng Yin *‡§, and Haitao Liu *†

^† Department of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, United States

^‡ Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering,Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, United States

^§ Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, United States

J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2013, 135 (18), pp 6778–6781

DOI: 10.1021/ja401785h

Publication Date (Web): April 10, 2013

Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society

We describe a method to form custom-shaped inorganic oxide nanostructures by using DNA nanostructure templates. We show that a DNA nanostructure can modulate the rate of chemical vapor deposition of SiO₂ and TiO₂ with nanometer-scale spatial resolution. The resulting oxide nanostructure inherits its shape from the DNA template. This method generates both positive-tone and negative-tone patterns on a wide range of substrates and is compatible with conventional silicon nanofabrication processes. Our result opens the door to the use of DNA nanostructures as general-purpose templates for high-resolution nanofabrication.