Bioconjugation of Silver Nanowires with Photosynthetic Light-Harvesting Complexes

We demonstrate a way to conjugate a light-harvesting complex, peridinin-chlorophyll-protein, with silver nanowires using biotin-streptavidin linker. In the case of conjugated structure we observe slight increase of the fluorescence intensity of the chlorophyll emission followed by the gradual decrease of the intensity due to photobleaching. For a non-conjugated mixture of peridinin-chlorophyll-protein with silver nanowires only the photobleaching takes place. The results suggest a possible way to fabricate hybrid nanostructures comprising light-harvesting complexes and metallic nanoparticles for achieving the efficient plasmon-induced enhancement of absorption of the light-harvesting complexes.