Nature has made extravagant use of a simple molecule–DNA, the floorplan of all earthly life.
Inventive researchers have used the same base-pairing properties that bond two strands of DNA into the familiar double helix to build innumerable useful structures at the nanometer scale.
One such method, known as DNA origami, has yielded rich results in recent years, enabling the construction of a rapidly growing menagerie of 2- and 3-dimensional objects, with far-flung applications in material science, nanoelectronics, photonics and the biomedical arena.
