Nucleic acid‐based nanotechnology

Abstract

DNA has often been described as the building block of life, a description that refers mainly to its role in storing and processing information. But DNA, as well as RNA, are also genuine building blocks per se that can form increasingly complex structures—loops, junctions, hairpins and so on. In fact, one of the advantages of DNA over RNA is that huge molecules can be compacted into a super‐dense storage medium that houses an enormous amount of information in each cell without consuming too much space needed by other functions. Its capability to self‐assemble makes DNA an ideal candidate for building nanostructures for applications both within and outside biology. Furthermore, the high precision of this assembly process based on nucleotide pairing lends itself to generating accurate molecular scaffolds with potential nanoscale applications, as well as for investigating the dynamics of biological reactions at atomic scale.Its capability to self‐assemble makes DNA an ideal candidate for building nanostructures for applications both within and outside biologyThe challenge for nanotechnology is harnessing these properties for crafting artificial structures, assembled by the same principles. Such attempts started in the early 1980s when Nadrian Seeman, a crystallographer at New York University, USA, who then came to specialize in DNA nanotechnology, conceived the idea of using DNA to build molecular scaffolds. His motivation was to develop a faster, more reliable and accurate way of crystallizing organic molecules than the existing trial‐and‐error approach. Seeman's idea was to build a simple DNA framework that would confine the molecule of interest in an exact position, effectively forming a single‐molecule crystal. He created DNA sequences comprising branched junctions with four arms, which became the foundation for making ever more complex DNA structures [1].A crucial element for DNA nanotechnology is the Holliday junction, discovered in 1964 as an important …