Folding DNA into Twisted and Curved Nanoscale Shapes

By Hendrik Dietz, Shawn M. Douglas, William M. Shih. Science, 2009

1,206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Stressful Self-Assembly One way to control shape during the assembly of an object is to design in stresses that cause a planned amount of deformation. Dietz et al. (p. 725; see the Perspective by Liu and Yan) designed DNA helix bundles, arranged in honeycomb lattices, in which some of the helices have insertions or deletions relative to the other helices in the bundles. The stresses help the bundles assemble into objects on the scale of tens of nanometers. Both the direction and degree of bending could be controlled, and curvatures as tight as 6 nanometers achieved. Complex shapes, such as square-toothed gears, could be created by combining multiple curved elements. Site-directed insertions and deletions of base pairs direct twist and curvature in crystal-like DNA arrays. We demonstrate the ability to engineer complex shapes that twist and curve at the nanoscale from DNA. Through programmable self-assembly, strands of DNA are directed to form a custom-shaped bundle of tightly cross-linked double helices, arrayed in parallel to their helical axes. Targeted insertions and deletions of base pairs cause the DNA bundles to develop twist of either handedness or to curve. The degree of curvature could be quantitatively controlled, and a radius of curvature as tight as 6 nanometers was achieved. We also combined multiple curved elements to build several different types of intricate nanostructures, such as a wireframe beach ball or square-toothed gears.

Subfields: Ecology, Mechanical Engineering, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e1a076175519f44e06896f02006ef9589d8f707

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

In Mechanical Engineering

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Towards atomic and close-to-atomic scale manufacturing (2019, background): “(b) DNA origami nanostructures: 2D DNA origami smiley face [67], 3D DNA origami in the shape of a gear [68], curved single-layer 3D origami in the shape of a vase [69], and DNA origami gridiron [70].”
Large-scale de novo DNA synthesis: technologies and applications (2014, methodology): “The emergence of DNA origami 123 and single-stranded tiles to form complex 2D and 3D shapes [124] [125] [126] has been used by researchers to tackle problems from materials 127 to therapeutics 128 .”
Nanomaterials Based on DNA (2010, background): “We discuss DNA origami in more detail below, but basically, a long viral single strand, the sequence accepted as a given, is used to scaffold about 250 shorter strands to produce a two-dimensional (21) or three-dimensional shape, either with straight (22) or bent (23) features.”