Designing Uniquely Addressable Bio-orthogonal Synthetic Scaffolds for DNA and RNA Origami

Jerzy Kozyra, Alessandro Ceccarelli, Emanuela Torelli, Annunziata Lopiccolo, Jing-Ying Gu, Harold Fellermann, Ulrich Stimming, and Natalio Krasnogor

DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.6b00271

Abstract:

Nanotechnology and synthetic biology are rapidly converging, with DNA origami being one of the leading bridging technologies. DNA origami was shown to work well in a wide array of biotic environments. However, the large majority of extant DNA origami scaffolds utilize bacteriophages or plasmid sequences thus severely limiting its future applicability as a bio-orthogonal nanotechnology platform. In this paper we present the design of biologically inert (i.e., “bio-orthogonal”) origami scaffolds. The synthetic scaffolds have the additional advantage of being uniquely addressable (unlike biologically derived ones) and hence are better optimized for high-yield folding. We demonstrate our fully synthetic scaffold design with both DNA and RNA origamis and describe a protocol to produce these bio-orthogonal and uniquely addressable origami scaffolds.