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Recovery of intact DNA nanostructures after agarose gel–based separation

Nature Methods volume 8, pages 192–194 (2011)Cite this article

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Molecular self-assembly using DNA as a structural building block has proven an efficient route for construction of nanoscale objects and arrays of ever-increasing complexity1. An important catalyst for advancing the field in recent years has been the scaffolded DNA origami strategy, in which a long 'scaffold' strand derived from a viral genome (M13) can be folded with hundreds of short synthetic 'staple' strands into a variety of custom two- and three-dimensional shapes2,3. This technology is being used to develop molecular tools for applications in fields such as structural biology4, single-molecule biophysics and drug delivery. Many of these applications require a homogenous sample of properly folded nanostructures greatly enriched over the misfolded intermediates and large aggregates characteristic of multilayer DNA-origami self-assembly.

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Figure 1: Agarose-gel and TEM analyses of various DNA origami objects after gel purification.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Simmel for providing TEM micrographs of the double-cross tensegrity structure. This work was funded by grants from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, US National Institutes of Health (1DP2OD004641-01 and 1U54GM094608-01) and Office of Naval Research (N000140911118 and N000141010241).

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  1. Gaëtan Bellot and Mark A McClintock: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cancer Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Gaëtan Bellot, Mark A McClintock, Chenxiang Lin & William M Shih

  2. Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Gaëtan Bellot, Mark A McClintock, Chenxiang Lin & William M Shih

  3. Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Chenxiang Lin & William M Shih

Authors
  1. Gaëtan Bellot
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  2. Mark A McClintock
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  3. Chenxiang Lin
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  4. William M Shih
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Correspondence to William M Shih.

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Supplementary Figures 1–9, Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary Methods (PDF 3392 kb)

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Bellot, G., McClintock, M., Lin, C. et al. Recovery of intact DNA nanostructures after agarose gel–based separation. Nat Methods 8, 192–194 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth0311-192

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