Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark and Caltech have developed a new method for organizing molecules on the nanoscale. Inspired by techniques used for folding DNA origami—first invented by Paul Rothemund, a senior research associate in computation and neural systems in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech—the team, which includes Rothemund, has fabricated complicated shapes from DNA’s close chemical cousin, RNA. Unlike DNA origami, whose components are chemically synthesized and then folded in an artificial heating and cooling process, RNA origami are synthesized enzymatically and fold up as they are being synthesized, which takes place under more natural conditions compatible with living cells. These features of RNA origami may allow designer RNA structures to be grown within living cells, where they might be used to organize cellular enzymes into biochemical factories. “The parts for a DNA origami cannot easily be written into the genome of an organism. An RNA origami, on the other hand, can be represented as a DNA gene, which in cells is transcribed into RNA by a protein machine called RNA polymerase,” explains Rothemund. So far, the researchers have demonstrated their method by designing RNA molecules that fold into rectangles and then further assemble
The post Programmed to Fold: RNA Origami has been published on Technology Org.
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