ellular organisms like diatoms. Yan cites such natural forms as a boundless source of inspiration for human-designed nanostructures.
Topology, a branch of mathematics, describes the spatial properties of shapes that may be twisted, stretched or otherwise deformed to yield new shapes. Such shape deformations may profoundly alter the geometry of an object, as when a donut shape is pinched and stretched into a figure eight, but the surface topology of such forms is unaffected.
Nature is also rich in topological structures, Yan notes, including the elegant Mbius. The circulations of earth's warmer and cooler ocean currents for example, describe a Mbius shape. Other topological structures are common to biological systems, particularly in the case of DNA, the 3 billion chemical bases of which are packed by the chromosome inside the cell, using topological structures. "In bacteria, plasmid DNA is wound into a supercoil," Yan explains. "Then the enzymes can come in and cut and reconfigure the topology to relieve the torsion in the supercoil so that all the other cellular machinery can have access to the gene for replication, transcription and so forth."
To form the Mbius strip in the current study, the group relied on properties of self-assembly inherent in DNA. A strand of DNA is formed from combinations of 4 nucleotide bases, adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G), which follow one another on the strand like necklace beads. These nucleotide beads can bind to each other according to a strict rule: A always pairs with T, C with G. Thus, a second, complementary strand of DNA binds with the first to form the DNA double helix.
In 2006, Paul Rothemund at Cal Tech demonstrated that the process of DNA self-assembly could be used to produce pre-designed 2D nanoarchitectures of astonishing variety. Thus, DNA origami emerged as a powerful tool for nanostructure design. The method relies on a long, single stranded segment of DNA
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| Contact: Joe Caspermeyer joseph.caspermeyer@asu.edu 480-727-0369 Arizona State University Source:Eurekalert |
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