QuoteMove over, nanotechnologists, and make room for the biggest of the small. Scientists at the Harvard's Wyss Institute have built a set of self-assembling DNA cages one-tenth as wide as a bacterium. The structures are some of the largest and most complex structures ever constructed solely from DNA, they report today's online edition of Science.
Moreover, the scientists visualized them using a DNA-based super-resolution microscopy method â€" and obtained the first sharp 3D optical images of intact synthetic DNA nanostructures in solution.
In the future, scientists could potentially coat the DNA cages to enclose their contents, packaging drugs for delivery to tissues. And, like a roomy closet, the cage could be modified with chemical hooks that could be used to hang other components such as proteins or gold nanoparticles. This could help scientists build a variety of technologies, including tiny power plants, miniscule factories that produce specialty chemicals, or high-sensitivity photonic sensors that diagnose disease by detecting molecules produced by abnormal tissue.
"I see exciting possibilities for this technology," said Peng Yin, Ph.D., a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute and Assistant Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, and senior author of the paper.
Building with DNA
DNA is best known as a keeper of genetic information. But scientists in the emerging field of DNA nanotechnology are exploring ways to use it to build tiny structures for a variety of applications. These structures are programmable, in that scientists can specify the sequence of letters, or bases, in the DNA, and those sequences then determine the structure it creates.
So far most researchers in the field have used a method called DNA origami, in which short strands of DNA staple two or three separate segments of a much longer strand together, causing that strand to fold into a precise shape. DNA origami was pioneered in part by Wyss Institute Core Faculty member William Shih, Ph.D., who is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Cancer Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Yin's team has built different types of DNA structures, including a modular set of parts called single-stranded DNA tiles or DNA bricks. Like LEGO® bricks, these parts can be added or removed independently. Unlike LEGO® bricks, they spontaneously self-assemble.
http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/148/
Does this mean that someday I could grow a copy of Scarlett Johansson?
Until the nucleases come along :wink2:
Nano! Nano! Says Mork. Solitary
Do they know how they did it yet?