Elucidating the Structural Origin of NIR-Emission from Ag-DNA

The interest in atomically precise metal cluster systems has grown over the last decades due to the physicochemical properties that emerge at the nanoscale compared to the bulk regime. Despite promising features, stability often hinders their use in real-life applications.

Since stabilization is critical, DNA has been proven to be a functional and versatile scaffold for luminescent silver clusters.

DNA oligomers are intrinsically biocompatible and are able to tune the emission color and promote high photoluminescence efficiencies.Near-infrared emitting DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters (NIR-emitting Ag-DNAs) are promising candidates for several potential applications, such as bioimaging and sensing, due to improved cell and tissue penetration of NIR light.

The development of NIR emissive Ag-DNAs currently needs to be improved by three main challenges: extremely limited structural information (only one is available), absence of a rationale for designing NIR-emitting Ag-DNAs with high luminescence yield, and poor understanding ofThis project aims to address these gaps by first synthesizing and screening a wealth of NIR-emitting Ag-DNAs and then employing state-of-the-art techniques, such as pair distribution function analysis and X-ray absorption spectroscopy, to characterize the best-performing candidates structurally.

Establishing a structure-luminescence rationale for NIR-emitting Ag-DNAs will be the ultimate goal of the project.

Such findings are paramount to performing electronic structure calculations, and it is the needed input for machine learning algorithms to predict NIR-emitting Ag-DNAs with tailored optical properties. The results of this proposal will thus pave the way for a myriad of different applications.