This work shows the synthesis and characterization of one-, two- and three-dimensional DNA-gold-nanoparticle hybridstructures, whereby DNA serves as a building block. The main part of this work focuses on structural characterizations, which are a big challenge to the available imaging and spectroscopic methods like atomic force, scanning electron and optical microscopy. The synthesis of one-dimensional assemblies was realized by the reduction of metal salt solutions at the backbone of DNA. Another strategy was the connection of pre-synthesized, cysteamine functionalized gold-nanoparticles along DNA strands, whereby the connection was done by using cis-platinum as linker. The resulting structures were characterized by TEM, SEM and AFM. While electron microscopy only allows to visualize the gold nanoparticles, AFM height and phase information was used to verify both DNA and particles. The two-dimensional structures, built up from immobilized and cross-linked gold-nanoparticles with DNA, were investigated by AFM and UV/Vis-spectroscopy. The attention was directed to the influence of the amount of crosslinking DNA and the resulting degree of aggregation, which led to two-dimensional assemblies. Here, a qualitative connection between structural and optical features was shown
