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Energy transfer

On the right path

Nature Chemistry volume 3, pages 269–270 (2011)Cite this article

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Controlled energy-transfer on a molecular scale is a goal in many areas of science, from artificial photosynthesis to molecular electronics. Now, DNA origami has been used to direct the transfer of energy from an excited input dye down one of two paths by precisely arranging a mediator dye.

Communication in the molecular world is inherently short range, for example one molecule can specifically 'recognize' another if they are within collision distance. There are, however, exceptions. Fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) is one of the names used to describe the transport of electronic excitation energy governed by long-range Coulomb interaction. To some people the 'F' stands for Förster after Theodor Förster who in 1948 made the first quantitative description of FRET in terms of easily accessible spectroscopic parameters. He showed that organic and inorganic dyes can transfer excitation energy over distances up to almost 100 Å — a distance far beyond the size of the molecules themselves1. The term “a spectroscopic ruler” was first used in the late 1960s by Stryer and Haugland2, and since then FRET has been used in numerous studies to estimate distances between chromophores attached to a wide variety of (macro)molecules in materials and biological sciences.

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Figure 1: A schematic showing the DNA origami.

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  1. Bo Albinsson is in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Göteborg, Sweden,

    Bo Albinsson

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  1. Bo Albinsson
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Correspondence to Bo Albinsson.

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Albinsson, B. On the right path. Nature Chem 3, 269–270 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.1016

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