Unfolding New Potentials for Nanotechnology With DNA origami

Image - Unfolding New Potentials for Nanotechnology With DNA Origami

Taking nanotechnology a step closer to realising the potential for high precision bio-nanodevices, UNSW researchers have developed a method to accurately measure DNA nanostructures, and discovered how to fold these building materials into different shapes.

As technology has improved and become more accessible, it has also become cheaper to manufacture. This is thanks to the field of nanotechnology, which has reduced the size of the components and harnessed novel properties of extremely small materials.

As miniaturisation approaches technical limits, nanotechnologists are turning to nature’s building blocks to make things even smaller and continue improving resolution, speed and precision of tools and machines.

“Nature achieves much smaller spatial resolution, and you don’t have to build it yourself, it self assembles,” says Dr Lawrence Lee, a researcher at UNSW’s Faculty of Medicine.

Dr Lee and his team at Single Molecule Science are using DNA origami to create nanodevices with greater resolution at a smaller scale than traditional nanotechnology offers.

“You take a long single stranded DNA and use shorter complimentary strands to control where it folds. Double stranded DNA is very rigid. You can create log-raft type structures by folding the strand over and over itself,” he says.

Until now though, it has been difficult to accurately measure DNA nanostructures and researchers are still figuring out how to manipulate their form.

Dr Lee’s team have developed a method of accurately measuring DNA origami structures by shining an X-ray light on them (X-ray scattering). They also discovered how to control the way that the DNA structures twist.

These findings are published in the journal ACS Nano with Dr Matt Baker and UNSW PhD student Andrew Tuckwell as the study co-first authors.

“Small changes in sequence alignment can dramatically change the magnitude of the twist,” says Dr Lee.

These discoveries will help researcher understand how to design DNA nanostrucutres to create nanoelectronic circuits, powerful nanosensors, single-molecule DNA sequencing devices and much more.

Date Published: 
Thursday, 14 June 2018