Gold nanoparticles can efficiently convert energy from incident light to local heat allowing their use as nanoscale heat sources, but measuring the temperature at the surface of these particles has remained a focus of ongoing research. Here we share the first steps towards a nanoscale thermal imaging approach using DNA-PAINT to interrogate the hybridization status of surface-tethered duplex DNA. DNA-PAINT is a super-resolution imaging technique where short fluorophore labeled strands of DNA transiently bind to single-stranded DNA tethered to a surface, thereby providing a fluorescent event which can be localized and counted. The number of fluorescent events due to transient binding between the fluorophore-labeled strands of DNA and surface-tethered DNA reports on the temperature-dependent denaturation of the duplex. This approach should provide thermal images of the maximum temperatures achieved directly at the nanoparticle surface with subdiffraction-limited resolution.

Towards quantitative nanothermometry using single molecule counting

ACS Spring 2022

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