DNA-Engineered Hydrogels with Light-Adaptive Plasmonic Responses

Orientational control of anisotropic plasmonic nanoparticles is an attractive proposition to generate dynamic plasmonic responses. Particularly, the use of light as a stimulus to modulate the orientation is extremely useful owing to its spatiotemporal operative ability. This work showcases a light-mediated approach to tune the orientational features of gold nanorods in DNA-engineered hydrogel materials. The strategy relies on the use of visible-light-induced photothermal effects to cause deformation of the hydrogel matrix, resulting in temperature-controlled polarization-dependent optical responses whose anisotropy features are highly adaptive to the nature of DNA crosslinks. The visible-light-mediated approach showcased here can open novel avenues to create dynamic light-responsive materials with reconfigurable plasmonic responses.