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(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health)
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Columbia University, and Van Andel Institute have developed a platform for assembling nanosized material components, or "nano-objects," of very different types—inorganic or organic—into desired 3-D structures. Synthetic DNA frames were engineered in the shape of a cube, octahedron, and tetrahedron. Inside the frames are DNA "arms" that only nano-objects with the complementary DNA sequence can bind to. These material voxels—the integration of the DNA frame and nano-object—are the building blocks from which macroscale 3-D structures can be made.
