Nano Borophene as a Programmable 2D Scaffold for Organized DNA Assembly and Long‐Range Energy Transfer

ABSTRACT

Two‐dimensional borophene, with its electron‐deficient bonding and structural polymorphism, is an emerging platform for constructing organized nano‐bio interfaces. In this work, we demonstrate molecularly programmed borophene‐DNA nanoarchitectures by interfacing χ ³ ‐phase borophene nanosheets with thiolated, fluorophore‐labeled stem‐loop oligonucleotides. Thermodynamic, spectroscopic, microscopic, and computational analyses reveal two governing interaction modes: a primary boron–sulfur anchoring interaction and a secondary guanine‐mediated surface interaction, which produce vertically and horizontally oriented DNA configurations on borophene. The resulting hybrids display efficient distance‐dependent fluorescence quenching via static nanosurface energy transfer, with a Stern–Volmer constant  K _sv =  1.4 × 10 ⁴  M ^{− 1} . Temperature‐dependent quenching and molecular dynamics simulations indicate formation of a stable ground‐state complex and long‐range photophysical coupling between the fluorophore and borophene. This distance‐responsive optical switching supports amplification‐free nucleic acid detection, achieving a detection limit of 37 viral RNA copies µL ^{− 1} for clinical HIV‐1 samples. Molecular dynamics simulations further corroborate the observed configurations and show favorable Gibbs free energies for both stem‐loop‐ and target‐bound states. Overall, borophene emerges as a chemically programmable, photophysically active 2D scaffold for organizing oligonucleotides into functional nanoarchitectures and guiding nano‐enabled optical sensing design.