Introduction to Self - Assembling DNA

Introduction. DNA, well-known as the predominant chemical for duplication and storage of genetic information in biology, has also recently been shown to be highly useful as an engineering material for construction of special purpose computers and micron-scale objects with nanometer-scale feature resolution. Properly designed synthetic DNA can be thought of as a programmable glue which, via specific hybridization of complementary sequences, will reliably self-organize to form desired structures and superstructures. Such engineered structures are inherently information-rich and are suitable for use directly as computers or as templates for imposing specific patterns on various other materials. In theory, DNA can be used to create any desired pattern in two or three dimensions and simultaneously to guide the assembly of a wide variety of other materials into any desired patterned structure. Given diverse mechanical, chemical, catalytic, and electronic properties of these specifically patterned materials, DNA self-assembly techniques hold great promise for bottom-up nanofabrication in a large number of potential applications in wide ranging fields of technology. Starting with background for understanding why the physical, chemical, and biological properties of DNA make it extremely useful as a "smart" material for nanoengineering projects, this chapter traces the historic development of DNA-based nanofabrication, outlines its major successes, and presents some possible future applications in fields as diverse as electronics, combinatorial chemistry, nano-robotics, and gene therapy,. DNA-based nanoengineering as a field is related to computational biology, bioinformatics, and genome informatics rather tangentially; it is more closely allied with biomolecular computation (BMC) – the engineering of biological macromolecules for production of artificial information processing systems. Rather than using binary, electronic computers for analyzing information extracted from biological systems, BMC seeks to utilize biomolecules directly as active parts of engineered computers. The concluding section of this chapter contains some speculation into the possibility of coming full circle and applying BMC and DNA-based nanoengineering principles and systems to the extraction and processing of information directly from biological DNA, that is, the possible use of natural DNA molecules as inputs for artificial DNA-based machines.