A new optical method for characterizing single molecule interactions based on dark field microscopy

Single-molecule techniques continue to gain in popularity in research disciplines such as the study of intermolecular interactions. These techniques provide information that otherwise would be lost by using bulk measurements that deal with a large number of molecules. We describe in this report the motion of tethered DNA molecules that have been...

The persistence length of double stranded DNA determined using dark field tethered particle motion

The wormlike chain model describes the micromechanics of semiflexible polymers by introducing the persistence length. We propose a method of measuring the persistence length of DNA in a controllable near-native environment. Using a dark field microscope, the projected positions of a gold nanoparticle undergoing constrained Brownian motion are...

Tethered particle motion mediated by scattering from gold nanoparticles and darkfield microscopy