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Figure 9.2 Examples of DNA nanotechnology. (a) Two-dimensional DNA origami self-
assembles from a long templating single-strand and a carefully designed mix of short single-
stranded “staples” into a predetermined pattern; Reprinted with permission from Ref. [11b].
Copyright 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim (b) likewise, three-dimen-
sional constructs like Seeman's cube can be assembled from a set of suitable sequences;
Reprinted with permission from Ref. [13a]. Copyright 1998 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co.
KGaA, Weinheim (c) circular single-stranded constructs of a triangular shape containing three
organic corners are hybridized with single-strands creating shape-persistent building blocks
that can polymerize into long tubes via hybridization of their sticky ends.
the result of numerous of such staple strands folding the template strand into a predeter-
mined 2-D pattern, here a smiley face, as designed before by a computer program based
on the length and sequence information of the used template strand and a carefully chosen
set of staple strands. Mixing the template and all staple strands together in the right stoi-
chiometry and allowing the mixture to slowly cool down so that all matching sequences
find each others then results in the formation of nanoscopic smileys consisting solely of
double-stranded DNA, as can be seen in the subsequent AFM analysis [11].
Since the staple strands are nothing more than relatively short single-stranded DNA
sequences that can be ordered from a DNA synthesis company nowadays via the internet,
obtaining them just requires to provide the sequence information for each desired strand.
The only remaining question is where to get the long, single-stranded template
sequence, since automated DNA synthesis can provide us with single-stranded DNA but
not such long strands, and the usual PCR process can give us long strands but not single-
stranded. The answer to this problem was found by looking at the few biological systems
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