A DNA clamp engineered for higher specificity and higher affinity may improve cancer diagnosis and treatment and may also mean better control over building nanomachines.
A major advance in the computational design of proteins that bind tightly to specific small molecules will facilitate several technologies, possibly including the development of atomically precise manufacturing.
A porous metal-organic framework ‘host’ soaks up molecular ‘guests’ to form a crystalline complex, the structure of which can be determined by X-ray crystallography, providing atomic-resolution structures of minute amounts of guest molecules, and perhaps eventually other nanostructures.
In two different sets of experiments a German research group has shown that scaffolded DNA origami can be used to assemble complex structures with precise sub-nanometer positional control, and that constant temperature reaction can greatly increase yields and decrease production times.
A set of 32-nucleotide single strand DNA bricks was designed so that each can interact independently with four other DNA bricks so that sets of hundreds of bricks can self-assemble into arbitrarily complex 25-nm 3D shapes, each comprising 1000 8-base pair volume elements.
A new online game allows players to design RNA molecules. The most promising designs are synthesized, and the players given real-world feedback on how well their designs worked.
A set of 310 short single-stranded DNA tiles, plus a few additional short sequences for the edges, has been used to form more than a hundred large, complex DNA objects.
New computational methods to explore the rapidly expanding collection of high resolution three-dimensional RNA structures reveal new RNA structural motifs, identifying additional building blocks for complex RNA nanostructures.
RNA CAD tools developed for RNA-regulated control of gene expression in synthetic biology successfully engineered metabolic pathways in bacteria. Will engineering RNA-based genetic control systems lead to design tools for other RNA-based molecular machine systems?
Adding a new molecular recognition code to structural DNA nanotechnology—a pattern of projecting and recessed blunt-end DNA helices can be used to code the assembly of DNA origami tiles into larger DNA nanostructures.
