Another dimension for DNA art

摘要

Through the ages, some of the most iconic and lasting artefacts of human ingenuity have been sculptures and carvings, created from a wide variety of materials. But until now, a general-purpose material from which nanometre-scale, three-dimensional shapes could be made has been lacking. On page 414 of this issue, Douglas et al. introduce a clever method for fabricating nanometre-scale objects from DNA, and report the construction of several such objects. The authors describe their method as "analogous to sculpture from a porous crystalline block", except that the structure of their block consists of tubes - DNA double helices -arranged in a regular honeycomb lattice. The desired shapes are not literally carved into the starting material, but instead form from DNA that has been designed to self-assemble into a supramolecular complex.