Folding Our Way to a Revolution
Monday, October 12th, 2009
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With a few strands of nucleic acids and some ingenious programming, DNA origami is remaking nanotechnology, from drug delivery to chip design.
A smiley face glowed on the March 16, 2006, cover of Nature. “DNA Origami,” read the headline. “Nanoscale Shapes the Easy Way.” Inside, a relatively brief, single-author paper outlined a method for designing shapes made from DNA that would fold up on their own. The smiling prototype and the playful cover line may have been cute. But the changes the paper brought to a number of far-flung fields were nothing short of profound: Tiny, self-assembling structures, with applications in everything from biology to chip design, were now within our grasp.
Three years later, the research sparked by this breakthrough has just begun to bear fruit, as evidenced by a flurry of papers this summer. Caltech’s Paul Rothemund, the author of the Nature paper, and his collaborators at IBM published a way to fasten DNA origami to microchip materials. William Shih at Harvard led a team that developed three-dimensional shapes and curving structures, among many refinements to the technique. And Jørgen Kjems of Denmark’s Aarhus University published a method to build miniature boxes, equipped with multiple locks and molecules that glow red and green. As it turned out, everyone from cell biologists to drug delivery experts to materials scientists had been looking for just such a way to build.
Building Blocks from Life
In biology, DNA carries information, but it is also in many ways an ideal building material. DNA’s sequence dictates the shape it folds into, and it is cheap and easy to manufacture strands with a custom sequence. And while the precise rules of protein folding are one of the great unsolved mysteries of biology, the folding of single- and double-stranded DNA is chemically well-understood.
DNA had thus been an attractive structural material for nanoengineers for decades, ever since NYU’s Ned Seemans founded the field of DNA nanotechnology in the 1970s. With tiny components that assemble themselves, it was hoped that miniature motors and microchips could be manufactured in beakers for almost no cost. But there was a major barrier to the realization of self-assembling machines. For while nanoengineers could manufacture custom DNA and predict how it would fold, there was no good way to program it into anything but the most basic of shapes.
Paul Rothemund had learned of Seemans’ work in the early 1990s while trying to build a DNA computer—a series of molecules that can perform computations, like a mechanical calculator. But he grew entranced by the idea of DNA shapes that could self-assemble. With this “bottom-up” assembly, a revolution in chip design—and computing speed—could be achieved. Three months of programming brought him to a process that landed him on the cover of Nature—and which has opened the floodgates of nanotech innovation.
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- DNA May Help Build Next Generation of Chips (wired.com)
- Self-Assembling DNA Makes Super 3-D Nano Machines (wired.com)
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