Functional assembly of aptamer binding sites by single-molecule cut-and-paste.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 22468898.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1021/nl300422y.
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Abstract
Bottom up assembly of functional molecular ensembles with novel properties emerging from composition and arrangement of its constituents is a prime goal of nanotechnology. By single-molecule cut-and-paste we assembled binding sites for malachite green in a molecule-by-molecule assembly process from the two halves of a split aptamer. We show that only a perfectly joined binding site immobilizes the fluorophore and enhances the fluorescence quantum yield by several orders of magnitude. To corroborate the robustness of this approach we produced a micrometer-sized structure consisting of more than 500 reconstituted binding sites. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of one by one bottom up functional biomolecular assembly.