Chad A. Mirkin Named Outstanding Young Investigator for Worte on DNA/Nanoparticle Hybrid Materials
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Chat! A. Mirkin Named Outstanding Young Investigator for Worte on DNA/Nanoparticle Hybrid Materials Cited for his "pioneering and leadership role in identifying, establishing, and developing a new interdiseiplinary field that focuses on using complex biological macromolecules to assemble inorganic nanoparticle building blocks into functional meso- and macroscopic struetures," Qiad A. Mirkin, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, is the reeipient of the 1999 Outstanding Young Investi gator Award from the Materials Research Society. This award recognizes exceptional, interdiseiplinary scientific work in materials research by a young scientist or engineer who also displays leadership in the materials area. In developing a method using DNA link er molecules to assemble nanoparticles into macroscopic aggregates, Mirkin with his research team has rapidly introduced and developed a class of hybrid bioorganic/ inorganic materials and an interdiseiplinary field of materials research. His approach to materials synthesis brings together elements of chemistry, biology, materials science, physics, and engineering, opening avenues to a class of nanostructured materials with physical and chemical properties that can be tailored with a high degree of control. Two years ago, in a seminal paper published in Nature 382 (1996) p. 607, Mirkin described a technique for using the sequence specific interactions of DNA to direct the assembly of particles of different sizes and compositions. Initially, he used this method to show one could "program" the assembly of coUoidal gold particles (13-nm diameter), tagged with the appropriate oligonucleotide sequences, into network architectures. These struetures exhibited fascinating optical prop erties that depended upon interparticle distance (controlled by the length of the DNAbased particle linker) and aggregate size. Mirkin and his co-workers recently showed that binary nanoparticle-based materials also can be prepared via this methodology. In one example, he showed how 31- and 8-nm diameter Au particles, modified with the appropriate oligonucleotides, could be assembled with complementary DNA into periodic network strue tures. According to his article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society 120 (1998) p. 1959, two general types of struetures can be formed. The first is a network structure, with big particle/ small particle periodicity, that canvasses macroscopic areas. The second is a "satellite nanostrueture" that consists of one 31-nm diameter particle surrounded by a Single layer of 8-nm particles. He points out that since these are "living
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struetures" they can be introduced into his assembly scheme to prepare even more sophisticated nanostructured architectures. Therefore, through selection of oligonu cleotide and nanoparticle chemical composition and size, Mirkin's method provides control over virtually all physical and chemi cal properties of the resulting materials. In 1997, (Science 277, p. 1078), Mirkin and his co-wo
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