There’s rarely time to write about every cool science story that comes our way. So this year, we’re running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one story that fell through the cracks each day, from December 25 through January 5. Today: Playing tic-tac-toe with DNA origami. Scientists at Caltech have created the world’s smallest game board for playing tic-tac-toe out of DNA strands. What’s more, it’s possible to swap hundreds of DNA strands in and out at once to reconfigure the nanostructure at will, making it possible in principle to build complicated nanomachines in different custom patterns. The scientists described their work in a December paper in Nature Communications. Back in 2006, Caltech bioengineer Paul Rothemund figured out how to fold a long strand of DNA into simple shapes, demonstrating this “DNA origami” technique by producing a smiley face. All you need is a long strand of DNA, plus several shorter strands (“staples”). Combine them in a test tube, and the shorter strands pull various parts of the long strand together so that it folds over into any number of simple shapes. DNA origami was a huge advance for nanotechnology, but to really achieve its full potential, scientists needed to be able to create larger and more complex structures. Last year, Rothemund’s Caltech colleague Lulu Qian introduced a cheap means of getting DNA origami to assemble itself into large arrays. The best part: you could create custom patterns. The array was a bit like a blank… [Read full story]
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