Main > NANOTECHNOLOGY > NanoFabrication > Org.: USA. C. (DNA NanoFabrication) > Work Description
At a scale of 1:200 trillion, Author s new map of the Americas won t help anyone trying to navigate a cross-country road trip. But the simple, universal design scheme that the Org. s
computer scientist invented to create the image-just a few hundred nanometers across and made entirely of DNA-offers scientists a stunningly simple and versatile route to create nanostructures from the bottom up.
DNA s regular structure and predictable chemistry make it an ideal building block for bottom-up fabrication. Scientists have been using it for years to build nanoscale cubes, cages, and octahedrons. Now, with his so-called DNA origami, Author
has taken DNA nanofabrication to a new level, creating DNA nanodesigns 10-fold more complex than any made previously.
With DNA origami, Author can knit the nucleic acid into any two-dimensional shape or pattern. Stars, snowflakes, and smiley faces just 100 nm wide are among his tiny creations.
Author starts the origami process by sketching out the nanostructure s desired shape on his computer. To this sketch, he computationally fits the structure s long, single-stranded DNA scaffold and hundreds of short pieces of DNA that will staple the scaffold rigidly in place. Design in hand, Author mixes the component nucleic acids together and anneals them for a couple of hours to generate the final structure in good to excellent yields. He says each nanostructure takes about two weeks to realize from concept to construction.
Work Description's products
This section has no products