Flow-enabled self-assembly of large-scale aligned nanowires.

One-dimensional nanowires enable the realization of optical and electronic nanodevices that may find applications in energy conversion and storage systems. Herein, large-scale aligned DNA nanowires were crafted by flow-enabled self-assembly (FESA). The highly oriented and continuous DNA nanowires were then capitalized on either as a template to form metallic nanowires by exposing DNA nanowires that had been preloaded with metal salts to an oxygen plasma or as a scaffold to direct the positioning and alignment of metal nanoparticles and nanorods. The FESA strategy is simple and easy to implement and thus a promising new method for the low-cost synthesis of large-scale one-dimensional nanostructures for nanodevices.