TY  - JOUR
AU  - Salamonczyk, Miroslaw
AU  - Zhang, Jing
AU  - Portale, Giuseppe
AU  - Zhu, Chenhui
AU  - Kentzinger, Emmanuel
AU  - Gleeson, James T.
AU  - Jakli, Antal
AU  - De Michele, Cristiano
AU  - Dhont, Jan K. G.
AU  - Sprunt, Samuel
AU  - Stiakakis, Emmanuel
TI  - Smectic phase in suspensions of gapped DNA duplexes
JO  - Nature Communications
VL  - 7
SN  - 2041-1723
CY  - London
PB  - Nature Publishing Group
M1  - FZJ-2016-06442
SP  - 13358 -
PY  - 2016
AB  - Smectic ordering in aqueous solutions of monodisperse stiff double-stranded DNA fragments is known not to occur, despite the fact that these systems exhibit both chiral nematic and columnar mesophases. Here, we show, unambiguously, that a smectic-A type of phase is formed by increasing the DNA’s flexibility through the introduction of an unpaired single-stranded DNA spacer in the middle of each duplex. This is unusual for a lyotropic system, where flexibility typically destabilizes the smectic phase. We also report on simulations suggesting that the gapped duplexes (resembling chain-sticks) attain a folded conformation in the smectic layers, and argue that this layer structure, which we designate as smectic-fA phase, is thermodynamically stabilized by both entropic and energetic contributions to the system’s free energy. Our results demonstrate that DNA as a building block offers an exquisitely tunable means to engineer a potentially rich assortment of lyotropic liquid crystals.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000387971800001
C6  - pmid:27845332
DO  - DOI:10.1038/ncomms13358
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/821204
ER  -