Scientist does “origami” folding with DNA

LONDON (Reuters) – A research scientist in the United
States has taken the art of “origami” folding to new heights —
using not paper but DNA.

Paul Rothemund of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena said on Wednesday he had woven strands of DNA into
two-dimensional shapes that could be important in the design of
nanodevices measuring only a few billionths of a meter across.

“The construction of custom DNA origami is so simple that
the method should make it much easier for scientists from
diverse fields to create and study complex nanostructures they
might want,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.

Nanotechnology involves manipulating materials on a
molecular or atomic scale. One nanometre is a billionth of a
meter, or about 80,000 times smaller than the width of a human
hair.

In nature such molecular machines perform biological
functions such as moving muscles and photosynthesis. The
technology is already being used in cosmetics, computer chips,
self-cleaning windows and stain-resistant clothes.

Rothemund, who described his DNA origami in the latest
edition of the journal Nature, has constructed DNA objects as
diverse as a triangle, five-pointed star, a smiley face and a
tiny map of the Americas smaller than a typical bacterium.

“A biologist might use DNA origami to take proteins which
normally occur separately in nature, and organize them into a
multi-enzyme factory that hands a chemical product from one
enzyme machine to the next in the manner of an assembly line,”
said Rothemund.

The process includes choosing a shape, using long DNA
strands folded to form a scaffold of it, stapling it together
with computer-generated short DNA strands and refining it on a
computer.

“The results that emerge are stunning,” Lloyd Smith, of the
University of Wisconsin in Madison, said in a commentary on the
research in the journal.