Biotemplated Lithography of Inorganic Nanostructures (BLIN) for Versatile Patterning of Functional Materials

Abstract

Here, we present a highly parallel fabrication method dubbed biotemplated lithography of inorganic nanostructures (BLIN) that enables large-scale versatile substrate patterning of metallic and semiconducting nanoshapes with various aspect ratios. We demonstrate the feasibility of our method by employing custom DNA origami structures and Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) as biotemplates for pattern mask formation. Subsequently, we show high-throughput fabrication of plasmonic (Au and Ag), semiconducting (Ge), and metallic (Al and Ti) nanoparticles on substrates such as indium tin oxide coated glass and silicon wafers. The patterning ability of BLIN ranges from ∼10 to 20 nm feature sizes (with DNA origami, dimensions ∼100 nm or less) to micrometer-long nanowires (with TMV). This combination of scales and material freedom could, with further improvements, provide a cost-efficient pathway for the mass production of versatile nanopatterned surfaces with even smaller feature sizes. BLIN presents a major advantage compared to similar, previously reported techniques, as it permits the use of inexpensive and highly convenient substrates such as optical glass while simultaneously imposing minimal material restrictions on the fabricated nanostructures. Therefore, we believe our method can serve as a viable and potent alternative to current state-of-the-art approaches to produce optically active substrates with various applications in plasmonics (resonances at the visible wavelength range), biosensing (surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy), and functional metamaterials.

Environment‐Dependent Stability and Mechanical Properties of DNA Origami Six‐Helix Bundles with Different Crossover Spacings

“…[9,10] The low-Mg 2+ ion content and the presence of digestion enzymes can lead to the unraveling and structural breakdown of the DNA nanostructures, thus imposing a limit to their lifetime. [11] Therefore, measures have been taken to protect DNA nanostructures from their environment by encapsulation, [11][12][13][14][15][16] by transferring their structural information into other materials, [17][18][19][20][21] by chemical [22,23] or enzymatic ligation [24,25] of the staple strands, or by covalently cross-linking neighboring DNA domains. [26][27][28][29] However, environmental stability is not unambiguous for all DNA nanostructures.…”

Hybrid Nanoassemblies from Viruses and DNA Nanostructures

“…Therefore, investigating especially the various assembly strategies of hybrid structures can be widely beneficial. For example, it has been demonstrated that both DNA origami and TMV viruses can be used as templates for molecular lithography [60], indicating that even hybrid structures may be potentially used in versatile solid-state patterning at the nanoscale.…”

Engineering Inorganic Materials with DNA Nanostructures

“…79 Recently, the authors introduced additional sacrificial layers in the molecular lithography scheme and therefore generalized the method to biotemplated lithography of inorganic nanostructures (BLIN, which can also utilize virus capsids for the mask formation). 80 As BLIN circumvents the relatively harsh HF etching, the improved method allows the fabrication of plasmonic (Au and Ag), semiconducting (Ge), and metallic (Al and Ti) NPs on a wide variety of substrate materials such as common optical glass. As these techniques are highly parallel, they allow for the formation of billions of nanostructures on the chosen substrates in one go, thus providing a cost-effective alternative to, e.g., EBL in wafer-scale manufacturing.…”