SEBASTIAN

Scientists have developed a way to carve shapes from DNA canvases, including all the letters of the Roman alphabet, emoticons and an eagle’s head.

Bryan Wei, a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues make these shapes out of single strands of DNA just 42 letters long. Each strand is unique, and folds to form a rectangular tile. When mixed, neighbouring tiles stick to each other in a brick-wall pattern, and shorter boundary tiles lock the edges in place.

…[Peng] Yin says that “any technological applications are highly speculative”. But he thinks he could create DNA tiles using L-DNA, a mirror-image form of the classic double helix that is not found in nature. Such structures might be useful for designing nano-scale devices for delivering drugs, especially because they would be less likely to be broken down by DNA-cutting enzymes or trigger an immune reaction. (» more)

favorite sequence: sunglasses, eagle’s head, Harvard crest, Red Sox B

story: DNA drawing with an old twist : Nature News & Comment

image: This post is written in a font made of DNA | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine