Programmable self-assembly of three-dimensional nanostructures from 10,000 unique components

DNA bricks with binding domains of 13 nucleotides instead of the typical 8 make it possible to self-assemble gigadalton-scale, three-dimensional nanostructures consisting of tens of thousands of unique components. Self-made nanostructures DNA self-assembly is widely used to produce nanoscale structures of ever increasing complexity. The largest structures that can be assembled reliably contain hundreds of individual DNA strands. Peng Yin and colleagues now show that a new generation of DNA bricks—short DNA strands that fold into brick-like shapes and self-assemble according to specific inter-brick interactions—makes it possible to assemble large DNA nanostructures containing a few tens of thousands of individual bricks. One structure, consisting of 10,000 bricks and having 20,000 uniquely addressable 'nano-voxels'—the three-dimensional equivalents of pixels—is used as a molecular analogue of clay to sculpt three-dimensional objects such as letters, a complex helicoid (a shape similar to a spiral staircase) and a teddy bear. With further optimization, the method might produce even larger assemblies that could find use as scaffolds or for positioning functional components. Three related papers is this issue report further advances in DNA origami, and all four are summarized in a News & Views. Nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) are widely used to construct nanometre-scale structures with ever increasing complexity 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , with possible application in fields such as structural biology, biophysics, synthetic biology and photonics. The nanostructures are formed through one-pot self-assembly, with early kilodalton-scale examples containing typically tens of unique DNA strands. The introduction of DNA origami 4 , which uses many staple strands to fold one long scaffold strand into a desired structure, has provided access to megadalton-scale nanostructures that contain hundreds of unique DNA strands 6 , 7 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 . Even larger DNA origami structures are possible 15 , 16 , but manufacturing and manipulating an increasingly long scaffold strand remains a challenge. An alternative and more readily scalable approach involves the assembly of DNA bricks, which each consist of four short binding domains arranged so that the bricks can interlock 8 , 9 . This approach does not require a scaffold; instead, the short DNA brick strands self-assemble according to specific inter-brick interactions. First-generation b