DNA/Origami/Overview

DNA offers an attractive material for constructing nanostructures. In particular, the high specificity of Watson-Crick base pairing allows a diverse set of binding interactions to occur in parallel in a reasonably predictable fashion Watson. Several groups have leveraged this feature of DNA to construct both two-dimensional sheets and three-dimensional structures Seeman, Shih. In 2006, Rothemund built upon previous work to demonstrate a general method for fabricating DNA into any two dimensional shape Rothemund. His algorithm generates short synthetic DNA staples that direct the folding of a long single-stranded DNA molecule (cloning vector M13 mp18) into arbitrary shapes.