The central dogma of molecular biology is the unifying principle for information flow within living cells, giving rise to everything from single-celled organisms to complex animals. Recent progress in creating rationally designed biomolecular systems raises a parallel question: what is the central dogma of DNA nanotechnology? That is, what are the ways by which information can flow within designed nucleic acid systems, and by what means can they affect or be affected by the larger molecular and physical world? These questions are important to the development of systems with complex functionalities and behaviors without requiring cellular machinery; in the extreme, they may even give DNA nanotechnology the potential to be a cell-free counterpart to synthetic biology.<br/><br/>  DNA nanotechnology is the rational design and synthesis of nucleic acid nanostructures with engineered functionalities. In this field, nucleic acids are used as non-biological engineering materials for nanotechnology rather than as the carriers of genetic information in living cells. Its capabilities include diverse two- and three-dimensional nanostructures, as well as artificial molecular machines and DNA computational circuits. While sophisticated spatial and temporal control have both been demonstrated in DNA self-assembly, they had largely been pursued separately.<br/><br/>  My dissertation extended a new approach, called developmental self-assembly, that integrates temporal with spatial control by using a prescriptive molecular program to specify the kinetic pathways by which DNA molecules isothermally self-assemble into well-defined three-dimensional geometries. Specifically, a wireframe DNA tetrahedron was synthesized and characterized, with nine DNA reactants initially co-existing in a metastable state, but upon catalysis by a DNA initiator molecule, they navigate 24 individually characterizable intermediate states via prescribed assembly pathways to arrive at the tetrahedral final product. My postdoctoral research aimed to extend this by establishing design paradigms for reconfigurable photonic devices using developmental self-assembly, where different molecular inputs, not limited to nucleic acid strands, would cause the structure to grow in different ways, leading to different optical properties through manipulating the location of fluorophores scaffolded on the DNA nanostructure

Design and synthesis of dynamically assembling DNA nanostructures

252nd National Meeting (2016)

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