DNA Nanotechnology

DNA nanotechnology is the design and manufacture of artificial nucleic acid structures for technological uses. In this field, nucleic acids are used as non-biological engineering materials for nanotechnology rather than as the carriers of genetic information in living cells. This use is enabled by the strict base pairing rules of nucleic acids, which cause only portions of strands with complementary base sequences to bind together to form strong, rigid double helix structures. This allows for the rational design of base sequences that will selectively assemble to form complex target structures with precisely controlled nanoscale features. DNA is the dominant material used, but structures incorporating other nucleic acids such as RNA and peptide nucleic acid (PNA) have also been constructed, leading to the occasional use of the name nucleic acid nanotechnology to describe the field.

The conceptual foundation for DNA nanotechnology was first laid out by Nadrian Seeman in the early 1980s, and the field began to attract widespread interest in the mid-2000s. Researchers in the field have created both static structures such as two- and three-dimensional crystal lattices, nanotubes, polyhedra, and arbitrary shapes; and functional structures such as molecular machines and DNA computers. A number of assembly methods are used to make these structures, including tile-based structures that assemble from smaller structures, folding structures using the DNA origami method, and dynamically reconfigurable structures using strand displacement techniques. The field is beginning to be used as a tool to solve basic science problems in structural biology and biophysics, including applications in crystallography and spectroscopy for protein structure determination. Potential applications in molecular scale electronics and nanomedicine are also being investigated.