Design and synthesis of novel hybrid metal complex–DNA conjugates: key building blocks for multimetallic linear DNA nanoarrays

Abstract

We describe here a short and efficient synthetic route for incorporating terpyridine based metal complexes at the 3′-extremity of both single and bis-oligonucleotide (bis-ODN) stretches to form novel metal complex–ODN conjugates. All single stranded mono and bis-ODN tethered metal complexes and the respective duplex ODNs were characterized by circular dichroism spectroscopy and UV-Vis melting experiments. Duplexes formed by these hybrid metal complex–DNA conjugates showed around 4–5 °C stabilization with respect to the unmodified duplexes. Moreover hybridization of two complementary bis-ODN tethered metal complexes at different ratios in solution gave rise to a self-assembled nanometric linear network, which was characterized by non-denaturing gel electrophoresis and TEM studies. Thus, our simple synthetic strategy would contribute to develop multimetallic 2D-DNA nanoarrays where we can place different metal complexes at regular intervals along the ODN stretches.