A DNA WHEEL

DNA Origami is a new type of nanotechnology. DNA, a fibrous molecule carrying genetic information, is used as a building material to construct nanostructures such as 2D patterns and 3D solids. There are several ways to construct, but all rely on the unique property of DNA that forms specific base-pairing between two strands. Once all DNA fragments are prepared, they precisely self-assemble into a shape. In this paper, a program to design DNA origami is reported, in which the sequence information for the DNA fragments are readily obtained by simply entering 3D data of your desired shape. Interestingly, 3D data are once converted into a graph to compute the assignments. Presented here is a pentagonal bipyramid, one of the shapes demonstrated in the paper. It looked like a wheel under an atomic force microscope.

One of 92 Johnson solids (J13). It has 10 vertices (4-deg x5 and 5-deg x2) and 10 faces (triangles x10). This solid is obtained by fusing two pentagonal pyramid at their bases. It has prism-like symmetry. The pentagonal pyramid is a Johnson solid as well (J2, V6[3⁵5¹]F6[3⁵5¹]), which is self-dual with pyramid-like symmetry.