DNA Origami

Dr. Paul W.K. RothemundSenior Research FellowCaltechAbstract:
A key goal for bottom-up nanofabrication has been to generate structures whose complexity matches that achieved by top-down methods. Towards this goal, DNA nanotechnology provides an attractive route. Here I describe a method for folding long single strands of DNA into arbitrary two dimensional target shapes using a raster fill technique. Self-assembled in a one-pot reaction from the 7 kilobase genome of phage M13mp18 and more than 200 synthetic oligodeoxynucleotides, the shapes are roughly 100 nm in diameter and nearly 5 megadaltons in mass. (For comparison the eukaroytic ribosome, one of nature's most complex molecular machines, is 4.2 megadaltons in mass.) Experimental shapes approximate target shapes, such as a 5-pointed star, with a resolution of 3.5 to 6 nm and may be decorated by arbitrary patterns at 6 nm resolution to form words or images.
Enabled by a program for laying out complicated designs and, utilizing inexpensive unpurified oligodeoxynucleotides, this method helps move DNA nanotechnology from the realm of research towards that of engineering.
The ability to create arbitrary shapes provides a new route to the bottom-up nanofabrication of complex nano-scale devices and instruments.
Physicists and materials scientists should be able to use DNA origami to arrange optical, electronic, and mechanical components into novel materials or even an integrated "nano-laboratory" of their choosing.
Biologists may be able to use these structures to position proteins and other biomolecules in precise arrangements to study their coupling. Indeed these structures may be thought of as a versatile "nanobreadboard", a simple platform for creating arbitrary nanostructures.Bio:
Paul W.K. Rothemund is a graduate of Caltech, where he dual majored in biology and computer science. His undergraduate project in information theory resulted in one of the first designs for a DNA computer---a DNA Turing machine---and became one of the first patents for DNA computation.
He has a long-standing interest in problems at the interface of biology, chemistry, and computer science: he would like to understand what parts of biology may be best viewed as computation and he would like to turn the process of chemical synthesis into an exercise in programming. After receiving his Ph.D. under Leonard Adleman at the University of Southern California, he was awarded a Beckman postdoctoral fellowship and returned to Caltech to work with professor Erik Winfree on algorithmic self-assembly of DNA. Dr. Rothemund currently continues this work as a senior research fellow at Caltech. In 2006 he was awarded the Foresight Institute's Feynman Prize for nanotechnology.

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