Electrophoresis of large DNA with a sparse zinc oxide nanowire array.

Abstract

We developed a simple inexpensive method to integrate ZnO nanowires into a microchannel using a combination of aqueous solution synthesis of ZnO nanowires and photolithography, which is used as a nanowire-embedded microfluidic device. The density of ZnO nanowires inside the microchannel is controllable by simply changing the concentration of the seed solution. We conducted a study of dynamic interactions between electric field driven !DNA and a single isolated ZnO nanowire using single molecule spectroscopy technique. The study shows that the hooking time is exponentially dependent on b/Rg, in agreement with a prediction by simulation work. We also find that the hooking probability for small values of b/Rg increases as the electric field strength increases.