Highly parallel magnetic tweezers by targeted DNA tethering.

Single-molecule force-spectroscopy methods such as magnetic and optical tweezers have emerged as powerful tools for the detailed study of biomechanical aspects of DNA-enzyme interactions. As typically only a single molecule of DNA is addressed in an individual experiment, these methods suffer from a low data throughput. Here, we report a novel method for targeted, nonrandom immobilization of DNA-tethered magnetic beads in regular arrays through microcontact printing of DNA end-binding labels. We show that the increase in density due to the arrangement of DNA-bead tethers in regular arrays can give rise to a one-order-of-magnitude improvement in data-throughput in magnetic tweezers experiments. We demonstrate the applicability of this technique in tweezers experiments where up to 450 beads are simultaneously tracked in parallel, yielding statistical data on the mechanics of DNA for 357 molecules from a single experimental run. Our technique paves the way for kilo-molecule force spectroscopy experiments, enabling the study of rare events in DNA-protein interactions and the acquisition of large statistical data sets from individual experimental runs.

Polarization tomography of metallic nanohole arrays.

We report polarization tomography experiments on metallic nanohole arrays with square and hexagonal symmetry. As a main result we find that a fully polarized input beam is partly depolarized after transmission through a nanohole array. This loss of polarization coherence is found to be anisotropic; i.e., it depends on the polarization state of the input beam. The depolarization is ascribed to a combination of two factors: (i) the nonlocal response of the array as a result of surface-plasmon propagation and (ii) the non-plane-wave nature of a practical input beam.