Regeneration of Light-Harvesting Complexes via Dynamic Replacement of Photodegraded Chromophores.

All-synthetic molecular donor-acceptor complexes are designed, which are capable of counteracting the effect of photoinduced degradation of donor chromophores. Anionic gallium protoporphyrin IX (GaPP) and semiconducting carbon nanotube (CNT) are used as a model donor-acceptor complex, which is assembled using DNA oligonucleotides. The GaPP-DNA-CNT complex produces an anodic photocurrent in a photoelectrochemical cell, which steadily decays due to photo-oxidation. By modulating the chemical environment, we showed that the photodegraded chromophores may be dissociated from the complex, whereas the DNA-coated carbon nanotube acceptors are kept intact. Reassociation with fresh porphyrins leads to the full recovery of GaPP absorption and photocurrents. This strategy could form a basis for improving the light-harvesting performance of molecular donor-acceptor complexes and extending their operation lifetime.

Understanding the mechanical properties of DNA origami tiles and controlling the kinetics of their folding and unfolding reconfiguration.

DNA origami represents a class of highly programmable macromolecules that can go through conformational changes in response to external signals. Here we show that a two-dimensional origami rectangle can be effectively folded into a short, cylindrical tube by connecting the two opposite edges through the hybridization of linker strands and that this process can be efficiently reversed via toehold-mediated strand displacement. The reconfiguration kinetics was experimentally studied as a function of incubation temperature, initial origami concentration, missing staples, and origami geometry. A kinetic model was developed by introducing the j factor to describe the reaction rates in the cyclization process. We found that the cyclization efficiency (j factor) increases sharply with temperature and depends strongly on the structural flexibility and geometry. A simple mechanical model was used to correlate the observed cyclization efficiency with origami structure details. The mechanical analysis suggests two sources of the energy barrier for DNA origami folding: overcoming global twisting and bending the structure into a circular conformation. It also provides the first semiquantitative estimation of the rigidity of DNA interhelix crossovers, an essential element in structural DNA nanotechnology. This work demonstrates efficient DNA origami reconfiguration, advances our understanding of the dynamics and mechanical properties of self-assembled DNA structures, and should be valuable to the field of DNA nanotechnology.