Interdisciplinary Science

Physics Material Science Engineering

Nanotechnology BiochemistryNanotechnology

DNA Nanotechnology

DNA Structure

DNA nanotechnology is a design and manufacture of

artificial nucleic acid structure for technological

uses

•Strict Base pairing rules of nucleic acids

A T C G

AdenineThymine

CytosineGuanine

Only portion of strands with complimentary base sequences bind together to form strong rigid double helix

Nadrian Seeman

You have to follow your nose and If you think what you are doing is interesting and exciting you have to have courage to do it

Nanostructure fabrication and confirmation process. The designed oligonucleotides were A) Hybridized, B) Ligated, C) Separated by agarose gel electrophoresis, D) Extracted and purified from a gel slice, E) Immobilized on a mica surface F) Subjected to AFM visualization.

Fig. 1. Structural design of (a) Y-shaped, (b) closed Y-shaped, (c) H-shaped, and (d) hexagonal nanostructures. Each arrow indicates an oligonucleotide of 54 mer in length.

(A) DNA structure of a covalently closed cube-like molecular complex. This is the first construction of a closed polyhedral object from DNA

(B) Truncated octahedron

ApplicationsA principal goal of DNA nanotechnology is the assembly of novel biomaterials for

Analytical Industrial Therapeutic purposes

Crystallography Molecules that are difficult to crystallize in isolation could be arranged within a three-dimensional nucleic acid lattice, allowing determination of their structure

This approach has been used to make logic gates such as AND, OR, and NOT gates. More recently, a four-bit circuit as demonstrated that can compute the square root of the integers 0–15, using a system of gates containing 130 DNA strands.

Computing

The assembly of a nucleic acid structure could be used to template the assembly of a molecular electronic elements such as molecular wires

Molecular electronics

Nanomedicine

Hollow DNA box containing proteins that induce apoptosis, or cell death, that will only open when in proximity to a cancer cell.

This 3-D print shows the structure of a functional synthetic membrane channel constructed through DNA nanotechnology.This DNA-based membrane channel consists of a needle-like stem 42 nanometers long with an internal diameter of just two nanometers,. (Credit: Dietz Lab, TU Muenchen; copyright TU Muenchen)

Future of DNA Nanotechnology

Seeman NC. In the nick of space: Generalized nucleic acid complementarily and the development of DNA nanotechnology. Synlett. 2000; 1536–1548.

Fu T-J, Seeman NC. DNA double cross-over structures. Biochem. 1993; 32 :3211–3220

Weiss. A Conversation with Prof. Ned Seeman: Founder of DNA Nanotechnology. 2008; ACS

Nano.vol. 2 no. 6.1089-1096

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