Polyelectrolyte mediated scalable synthesis of highly stable silver nanocubes in less than a minute using microwave irradiation.

Silver nanocubes were synthesized for the first time in large quantities on gold seed in the presence of a polyelectrolyte using microwave heating for 60-120 s. Our experiment indicates that the polyelectrolyte directs the growth of the particle in a specified crystallographic direction resulting in the faceted particle, i.e.

Label-less fluorescence-based method to detect hybridization with applications to DNA micro-array.

By coupling scattered light from DNA to excite fluorescence in a polymer, we describe a quantitative, label-free assay for DNA hybridization detection. Since light scattering is intrinsically proportional to number of molecules, the change in (scattering coupled) fluorescence is highly linear with respect to percent binding of single stranded DNA (ssDNA) target with the immobilized ssDNA probes. The coupling is achieved by immobilizing ssDNA on a fluorescent polymer film at optimum thickness in nanoscale.