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Scientists accidentally made Pac-man ghosts out of DNA Origami

2022-01-18 00:00:00

A group of scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering recently conducted an experiment in which they trained strands of DNA to assemble together Voltron-style to create intricate living structures based on certain instructions.

I don't entirely understand what this means, but here's how they explained it in an upcoming scientific paper from the journal of Biology:

Using a library of ~2000 strands [of DNA origami] that can be combinatorially assembled to yield any of ~1e48 distinct DNA origami slats, we realize five-gigadalton structures composed of >1000 uniquely addressable slats, and periodic structures incorporating >10,000 slats. Thus crisscross growth provides a generalizable route for prototyping and scalable production of devices integrating thousands of unique components that each are sophisticated and molecularly precise.

Okay, so I still don't totally understand what that means. But I did see this tweet from the lead author on the paper:

Can DNA be made to assemble into giant structures as intricate as living cells? In the preprint I led, we put ~1000 unique origami nanorods into shapes like this ghost, with a footprint larger than a single E. coli! (https://t.co/afKdSKB7JQ) pic.twitter.com/h4iLKmrIDd — Chris Wintersinger (@Cwintersinger) January 9, 2022

Which is very clearly one of the ghosts from Pac-man:

Jokes aside, the fact that you can program DNA to form complex shapes is pretty incredible. They also trained the DNA to form hearts, which is kind of sweet.

Thank you to @DionisMinev, @aersh0va, @HiroshiSasak1, @feduardocd, Gokul Gowri, Jonathan F. Berengut, Prof. Peng Yin, and my PhD advisor Prof. William M. Shih for amazing teamwork and really putting our entire "hearts" into structural DNA nanotechnology😂 pic.twitter.com/S5NpIkbynu — Chris Wintersinger (@Cwintersinger) January 9, 2022

Multi-micron crisscross structures from combinatorially assembled DNA-origami slats [Christopher M. Wintersinger, Dionis Minev, Anastasia Ershova, Hiroshi M. Sasaki, Gokul Gowri, Jonathan F. Berengut, F. Eduardo Corea-Dilbert, Peng Yin, William M. Shih / bioRxiv]
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[1] URL: https://boingboing.net/2022/01/18/scientists-accidentally-made-pac-man-ghosts-out-of-dna-origami.html
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

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