Paul Rothemund, Ph.D., of the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena, Calif., will present his findings March 26 in
Atlanta, Ga., at the 231st national meeting of the American
Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society. A
paper on the discovery, which Rothemund calls "scaffolded DNA
origami," was published in the March 16 issue of the journal
Nature. The complexity of shapes that Rothemund has achieved
from programming strands of DNA, including snowflakes, smiley
faces and even a map of the Americas, are about 10-fold more
complex than the field of molecular self-assembly has mustered
to date, yet one doesn’t even need a science degree to make
them, according to Rothemund. The technique is simple because it
starts with a single, complete scaffold — one strand of viral
DNA — and uses short, complementary strands as staples to fold
and keep the scaffold in place. In Rothemund’s ‘one-pot’
approach, "the scaffold is already perfect; all the information
is there," he says, "so you can afford