Hacking DNA to make next-gen semiconductor materials

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Columbia University, and Stony Brook University have developed a universal method for producing a wide variety of designed metallic and semiconductor 3D nanostructures. “[B]y building on previous achievements, we have developed a method for converting these DNA-based structures into many types of functional inorganic 3D nano-architectures, and this opens tremendous opportunities for 3D nanoscale manufacturing," said Oleg Gang, one of the scientists involved in this study. The research work was done at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE-funded user facility at BNL. CFN is a leader in researching self-assembly – the process by which molecules spontaneously organize themselves – and scientists at CFN are experts at DNA-directed assembly.