Nucleic Acid Superstructures: Assembly Stories

Designing ordered nucleic acid self-assembly processes.

A major goal of self-assembly research is the synthesis of biomolecular structures with diverse, intricate features across multiple length scales. Designing self-assembly processes becomes more difficult as the number of species or target structure size increases. Just as the ordered assembly of a machine or device makes complex manufacturing possible, ordered (or 'algorithmic') biomolecular se...

Nanolayered Carbon/Silica Superstructures via Organosilane Assembly

Carbon and silica play an important role in materials science due to their importance in both practical applications and academic research. To synergistically utilize their interesting properties, attention has been increasingly paid to synthesizing carbon/silica hybrid nanocomposites with new interesting functionalities. Various approaches have been extensively explored to achieve this goal. A...

Triggering nucleic acid nanostructure assembly by conditional kissing interactions

Nucleic acids are biomolecules of amazing versatility. Beyond their function for information storage they can be used for building nano-objects. We took advantage of loop-loop or kissing interactions between hairpin building blocks displaying complementary loops for driving the assembly of nucleic acid nano-architectures. It is of interest to make the interaction between elementary units depend...

Dynamic assembly of primers on nucleic acid templates

A strategy is presented that uses dynamic equlibria to assemble in situ composite DNA polymerase primers, having lengths of 14 or 16 nt, from DNA fragments that are 6 or 8 nt in length. In this implementation, the fragments are transiently joined under conditions of dynamic equilibrium by an imine linker, which has a dissociation constant of approximately 1 muM. If a polymerase is able to exten...

Self-Assembly of Functionalized Synthetic Nucleic Acid Bases