Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Osama El-ZubirORCiD, Dr James Quirk, Dr James DawsonORCiD, Dr Ben HorrocksORCiD, Professor Andrew HoultonORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2025 The Author(s)Biology's information carrier, DNA, through its reliable synthesis, controllable length, and sequence-coded self-assembly, provides a unique capability for molecular-material/-device design. However, the intrinsic lack of tunable optoelectronics associated, generally, with delocalized electronic structures means it commonly acts in a passive role to organize “functional” components. The introduction of metal ions into duplex DNA to overcome this limitation has been widely explored, but, to date, the demonstration of such electronically delocalized motifs has proved elusive. Here, we incorporate Au(I)-thionate coordination chains into discrete duplex-DNA molecules by substituting native guanosine with the sulfur-modified analog, 6-thioguanosine. The resulting “24-karat DNA” displays the associated photoluminescence of the metallo chain, along with chiro-optical properties indicating this is conformationally flexible, adopting a duplex-matching helical arrangement. Furthermore, due to the electronic delocalization in the coordination chain, these features can be modulated by a simple extension of the thioG-sequence and {μS-Au-}n chain length and so provide a new tunability to the electronic structure of DNA-based architectures.
Author(s): El-Zubir O, Quirk JA, Dawson JA, Horrocks BR, Houlton A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Chem
Year: 2025
Volume: 11
Issue: 11
Print publication date: 01/11/2025
Online publication date: 03/06/2025
Acceptance date: 12/05/2025
Date deposited: 16/06/2025
ISSN (print): 2451-9308
ISSN (electronic): 2451-9294
Publisher: Elsevier Inc.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.2025.102617
DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2025.102617
Data Access Statement: The datasets generated during this study are available at https://doi.org/10. 25405/data.ncl.26213246
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
