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Caltech scientists use DNA tiles to play tic-tac-toe at the nanoscale

Scientists at Caltech have created the world's smallest game board for playing tic-tac-toe out of DNA strands. What's more, it's possible to swap hundreds of DNA strands in and out at once to reconfigure the nanostructure at will, making it possible in principle to build complicated nanomachines in different custom patterns. The scientists described their work in a December paper in Nature Communications.

Back in 2006, Caltech bioengineer Paul Rothemund figured out how to fold a long strand of DNA into simple shapes, demonstrating this "DNA origami" technique by producing a smiley face. All you need is a long strand of DNA, plus several shorter strands ("staples"). Combine them in a test tube, and the shorter strands pull various parts of the long strand together so that it folds over into any number of simple shapes. DNA origami was a huge advance for nanotechnology, but to really achieve its full potential, scientists needed to be able to create larger and more complex structures.

Last year, Rothemund's Caltech colleague Lulu Qian introduced a cheap means of getting DNA origami to assemble itself into large arrays. The best part: you could create custom patterns. The array was a bit like a blank canvas, and Qian demonstrated the power of her technique (dubbed "fractal assembly") by creating the world's smallest version of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," visible only with atomic force microscopy.

[...] To create their game of tic-tac-toe, Qian et al. mixed up a solution of blank tiles in a test tube and let it self-assemble into a game board. Then the "players" took turns adding either custom tailored X tiles or O tiles to the test tube, which would replace the blank tiles already in those positions. Per the Caltech press release, "After six days of riveting gameplay, player X emerged victorious." (It declined to identify player X.)

Of course, playing tic-tac-toe is just a handy way to demonstrate the technique. The true benefit lies in enabling bioengineers to build more complicated and sophisticated nano machines that can be reconfigured at will. "When you get a flat tire, you will likely just replace it instead of buying a new car. Such a manual repair is not possible for nanoscale machines," said co-author Grigory Tikhomirov. "But with this tile displacement process we discovered, it becomes possible to replace and upgrade multiple parts of engineered nanoscale machines to make them more efficient and sophisticated."

DOI: Nature Communications, 2018. 10.1038/s41467-018-07805-7 (About DOIs).

Listing image by Qian Lab/Caltech

Original Submission