Self-assembly of DNA into nanoscale three-dimensional shapes

By Shawn M. Douglas, Hendrik Dietz, Tim Liedl, B. Hogberg, Franziska Graf, William M. Shih. Nature, 2009

2,343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Molecular self-assembly offers a ‘bottom-up’ route to fabrication with subnanometre precision of complex structures from simple components. DNA has proved to be a versatile building block for programmable construction of such objects, including two-dimensional crystals, nanotubes, and three-dimensional wireframe nanopolyhedra. Templated self-assembly of DNA into custom two-dimensional shapes on the megadalton scale has been demonstrated previously with a multiple-kilobase ‘scaffold strand’ that is folded into a flat array of antiparallel helices by interactions with hundreds of oligonucleotide ‘staple strands’. Here we extend this method to building custom three-dimensional shapes formed as pleated layers of helices constrained to a honeycomb lattice. We demonstrate the design and assembly of nanostructures approximating six shapes—monolith, square nut, railed bridge, genie bottle, stacked cross, slotted cross—with precisely controlled dimensions ranging from 10 to 100 nm. We also show hierarchical assembly of structures such as homomultimeric linear tracks and heterotrimeric wireframe icosahedra. Proper assembly requires week-long folding times and calibrated monovalent and divalent cation concentrations. We anticipate that our strategy for self-assembling custom three-dimensional shapes will provide a general route to the manufacture of sophisticated devices bearing features on the nanometre scale.

Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84b395a068d9b2ae96c014a18e62bb9aa91bd43b

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Citations in the corpus

A BIRD’S EYE VIEW: TRACKING SLOW NANOMETER-SCALE MOVEMENTS OF SINGLE MOLECULAR NANO-ASSEMBLIES (2010, neutral): “…the study of constructing programmable nanometer-scale structures and devices based on the Watson–Crick basepairing rules and catalytic properties of DNA, has continuously accelerated in pace since its conception in the early 1980s (Douglas et al., 2009; Rothemund, 2006; Seeman, 2007).”
DNA rendering of polyhedral meshes at the nanoscale (2015, background): “8 ‐ 14 ) revealed objects in good accordance with prediction, although the hollow structures sometimes appear collapsed in the dried ‐ out state of negative stain TEM.”
Rapid prototyping of 3D DNA-origami shapes with caDNAno (2009, methodology): “Toward increasing the size of DNA-origami design space, we recently extended DNA origami to construction of 3D shapes (14).”