Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Todays Agenda
An introduction to the DNA origami methodology
Scaffolds, staples, bridges, pixels
That scale bar says 50 micrometers. This house dust mite is around 400 micrometers by 300 micrometers. Most of the scale bars well see today are in nanometers, a thousandth of a micrometer.
Usual scaffold is M13mp18 viral genome, 7249-nt single stranded. This design requires a 900 nt scaffold.
Yellow dot marks a spot where the seam can be bridged by a staple.
Creating pixels
Pixels are created by modifying staple strands. Staples can be given biotin tags, etc. In this paper, a dumbbell hairpin is used, causing the flagged staples to have slightly more thickness under the AFM tip.
Dolphin design
One goal of this study was to gauge whether the flexibility of the product could be controlled by restricting stapling across seams
Flexible Tails
Interestingly, dolphin 1 in figure B (top right) has a very blurry tail this dolphin is oriented perpendicular to the direction of AFM scanning, suggesting the tail region was knocked around by the probe.
On to the box
3D origami structures, a natural next step, followed shortly thereafter. In fact, the paper Im presenting today had a couple rivals this image is from a paper submitted by a Japanese group that same year. Perhaps the lock/key mechanism was what gave Andersens group the edge.
Kuzuya and Komiyama (2009)
The depth was less than expected in the absence of cargo, the hollow box seemed prone to collapse under the force of the probe from the AFM. See supplement for theoretical models of collapsed structures.
Cryo-electron microscopy not my field of expertise, but thick lines apparently reflect dense faces.
Possible Cargo
Large enough to contain a ribosome (20nm diameter) Poliovirus State the box can be opened and then resealed I wonder how youd encourage cargo into the box?
Take-home points
DNA origami is a relatively low-cost means of producing nano-scale structures The field is no longer niche several labs in the world now involved. Software is available for designing basic DNA origami templates from provided bitmaps (make your own likeness out of DNA!)