DNA nanotechnology is the design and manufacture of artificial nucleic acid structures for technological uses. 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. The field is beginning to be used as a tool to solve basic science problems in structural biology and biophysics.
About DNA nanotechnology in brief
DNA nanotechnology is the design and manufacture of artificial nucleic acid structures for technological uses. 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. The field is beginning to be used as a tool to solve basic science problems in structural biology and biophysics. Potential applications in molecular scale electronics and nanomedicine are also being investigated. Researchers in the field have created static structures such as two- and three-dimensional crystal lattices, nanotubes, polyhedra, and arbitrary shapes, and functional devices such as molecular machines and DNA computers. In DNA nanotechnology, the base sequences of strands are rationally designed by researchers so that the base pairing interactions cause the strands to assemble in the desired conformation. DNA is well-suited to nanoscale construction because the binding between two nuclei acid strands depends on simple base pairing rules which are well understood, and form the specific Nanoscale structure of the nucleic Acid double helix. This property is absent in other materials, including proteins, for which protein design is very difficult, and nanoparticles, which lack the capability for specific assembly on their own. The structure of a nucleicacid molecule consists of a sequence of nucleotides distinguished by which nucleobase they contain. One of the simplest branched structures is a four-arm junction that consists of four individual DNA strands, each of which are complementary in a specific pattern in a natural Holliday junctions at a fixed point.
The same principles have been used with other types of nucleic fatty acids as well, leading to the occasional use of the alternative name nucleic amino acid nanotechnology. Some complexes combine features of both the structural and dynamic subfields, such as nucleomechanical devices, which combine the features of nanchanical features of the two subfields to create a nanotechnology device that can be used in a variety of ways. The structures are sometimes divided into two overlapping subfields: structural DNA nanotech and dynamic DNA nan Technology, sometimes abbreviated as SDN, focuses on synthesizing and materials that assemble into a static, equilibrium state. On the other hand, dynamic DNA Nanotechnology focuses on complexes with useful behavior such as the ability to reconfigure non-equilibrium DNA complexes based on a chemical or physical stimulus such as a Holliday junction in a nanomechanically-induced state. In the latter field, DNA is the dominant material used, but structures incorporating other nuclei acids such as RNA and peptide nucleic Amino acids have also been constructed. This is because the properties of DNA make it easy to control the structure of these structures in an easily controllable way. This allows for the rational design of base sequences that will selectively assemble to form complex target structures with precisely controlled nanoscale features. Several assembly methods are used, including tile-based structures that assemble from smaller structures, folding structures using the DNA origami method, and dynamically reconfigurable structures using strand displacement methods.
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This page is based on the article DNA nanotechnology published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 14, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
