Complex wireframe DNA nanostructures from simple building blocks

DNA nanostructures with increasing complexity have showcased the power of programmable self-assembly from DNA strands. At the nascent stage of the field, a variety of small branched objects consisting of a few DNA strands were created. Since then, a quantum leap of complexity has been achieved by a scaffolded ‘origami’ approach and a scaffold-free approach using single-stranded tiles/bricks—creating fully addressable two-dimensional and three-dimensional DNA nanostructures designed on densely packed lattices. Recently, wireframe architectures have been applied to the DNA origami method to construct complex structures. Here, revisiting the original wireframe framework entirely made of short synthetic strands, we demonstrate a design paradigm that circumvents the sophisticated routing and size limitations intrinsic to the scaffold strand in DNA origami. Under this highly versatile self-assembly framework, we produce a myriad of wireframe structures, including 2D arrays, tubes, polyhedra, and multi-layer 3D arrays.