Soft Matter Seminar: “Economical routes for size-specific assembly of DNA origami tubules”

The Syracuse University Department of Physics Soft Matter group is pleased to welcome Dr. Thomas Videbaek, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Brandeis University.

“Economical routes for size-specific assembly of DNA origami tubules”

Self-assembly is one of the most promising strategies for making functional materials at the nanoscale. Typically, synthetic self-assembly has been limited to spatially unbounded periodic lattice structures. In contrast to this, many biological systems have developed the ability to create complex self-limited structures, such as viral capsids and microtubules. Inspired by these biological systems, we make triangular subunits using DNA origami that have specific, valence-limited interactions and designed binding angles that assemble into tubules. Though we design our subunits to create a specific structure, experiments reveal a broad distribution of tubule types, with varying width and helicity. This is the result of a general challenge in self-limited assemblies, that thermal fluctuations of the inter-subunit binding angles often lead to polymorphism in the final assembly outcome. Here, we introduce a strategy to eliminate polymorphism by increasing the assembly complexity. By increasing the number of components in the assembly, we can keep the target structure unchanged while reducing the density of off-target states, increasing the selectivity of a user-specified target structure to nearly 100%. These results reveal an economical limit for self-limited assemblies that balances selectivity with assembly complexity up to arbitrary assembly size.