Self-assembly of conjugated polymers and ds-oligonucleotides directed fractal-like aggregates

Abstract

Highly ordered nanostructures between conjugated polymers and ds-oligonucleotides have been first fabricated by simply controlling the self-assembly processes, which shows a novel concept for fabricating fractal-like structures. The formation of polymer/DNA fractal-like aggregates is a diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) process. The fractal dimension is independent of the polymer/DNA concentration but only related to the polymer/DNA charge ratio. More interestingly, the different fluorescent resonance energy transfer (FRET) behavior between the polymer and the DNA can be used to distinguish dsDNA from ssDNA.