Stability of DNA-linked nanoparticle crystals: Effect of number of strands, core size, and rigidity of strand attachment

Three-dimensional ordered lattices of nanoparticles (NPs) linked by DNA have potential applications in novel devices and materials, but most experimental attempts to form crystals result in amorphous packing. Here we use a coarse-grained computational model to address three factors that impact the stability of bcc and fcc crystals formed by DNA-linked NPs : (i) the number of attached strands to the NP surface, (ii) the size of the NP core, and (iii) the rigidity of the strand attachment. We find that allowing mobility in the attachment of DNA strands to the core NP can very slightly increase or decrease melting temperature T-M. Larger changes to T-M result from increasing the number of strands, which increases T-M, or by increasing the core NP diameter, which decreases T-M. Both results are consistent with experimental findings. Moreover, we show that the behavior of T-M can be quantitatively described by the model introduced previously [F. Vargas Lara and F. W. Starr, Soft Matter, 7, 2085 (2011)]. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3596745]