Self-organizing materials built with DNA

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DNA Nanotechnology: A Foundation for Programmable Nanoscale Materials

Biological self-organization as an inspiration for materials science

Biological form and structure have long fascinated humanity. Cave paintings from as far back as 30,000 bc depict animal and plant forms,¹and natural philosophers have collected, described, and classified vast numbers of paleontological and contemporary biological samples. Such samples helped Charles Darwin develop his evolutionary theory. Zoologist E. Haeckel, one of Darwin's great popularizers, drew the often highly symmetric beauty of life forms,²which led Haeckel to speculate about the transition from crystalline substances to living matter.

More recently, scientists have aspired to quantitatively understand biological organization. In his book On Growth and Form, the "first biomathematician" d'Arcy Wentworth Thompson applied mathematical and physical reasoning to describe the general principles that govern the appearance of biological forms.³On the molecular level, E. Schrödinger speculated on the biological necessity of structures that are both regular (like crystals) and aperiodic, allowing storage and transmission of information.⁴Similar ideas about the role of information and complexity in the context of materials were later explored by A.L. Mackay.⁵Mathematicians such as A. Turing and J. von Neumann also introduced mechanistic and algorithmic descriptions of pattern formation, morphogenesis, and self-replication.^6,7

Such models of biological organization suggest means by which forms and patterns might be generated artificially. From a materials science point of view, this is of great interest, as there are many fascinating aspects of biological structures that one would like to mimic in an engineering context. For example, biological forms such as folded tissues, butterfly wings, muscles, or the genome often have hierarchical structure and are patterned on multiple length scales. They are responsive and even active; many are highly resilient and can regrow or heal when damaged.

In this article, we discuss how the ability to control DNA interactions can provide a link between theoretical ideas about biological organization and material design. DNA's unique dual role as a biopolymer and information carrier or "molecular code" allows it to implement mechanisms inspired by biological self-organization to create functional materials with similar properties.

Models of self-organization and self-assembly

Both self-organization and self-assembly refer to the formation...