A group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has designed, constructed, and imaged a single strand of DNA that spontaneously folds into a highly rigid, nanoscale octahedron that is several million times smaller than the length of a standard ruler and about the size of several other common biological structures, such as a small virus or a cellular ribosome. Making the octahedron from a single strand was a breakthrough. Because of this, the structure can be amplified with the standard tools of molecular biology and can easily be cloned, replicated, amplified, evolved, and adapted for various applications. This process also has the potential to be scaled up so that large amounts of uniform DNA nanomaterials can be produced. These octahedra are potential building blocks for future projects, from new tools for basic biomedical science to the tiny computers of tomorrow.
