Single-stranded DNA and RNA origami

Dongran Han, Xiaodong Qi, Cameron Myhrvold, Bei Wang, Mingjie Dai, Shuoxing Jiang, Maxwell Bates, Yan Liu, Byoungkwon An, Fei Zhang, Hao Yan, Peng Yin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

168 Scopus citations

Abstract

Self-folding of an information-carrying polymer into a defined structure is foundational to biology and offers attractive potential as a synthetic strategy. Although multicomponent self-assembly has produced complex synthetic nanostructures, unimolecular folding has seen limited progress.We describe a framework to design and synthesize a single DNA or RNA strand to self-fold into a complex yet unknotted structure that approximates an arbitrary user-prescribed shape. We experimentally construct diverse multikilobase single-stranded structures, including a ∼10, 000-nucleotide (nt) DNA structure and a ∼6000-nt RNA structure. We demonstrate facile replication of the strand in vitro and in living cells. The work here thus establishes unimolecular folding as a general strategy for constructing complex and replicable nucleic acid nanostructures, and expands the design space and material scalability for bottom-up nanotechnology.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numberaao2648
JournalScience
Volume358
Issue number6369
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 15 2017

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General

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