Researchers Design DNA With New Shapes and Structures 47
Jason Koebler writes: The shape of DNA is a double helix, right? That's what we are taught. Well, now the answer is "not always." Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered how to program DNA to be shaped like a bowl, or a spiral, or a ring, or other shapes that aren't found in nature.
It's the latest in a string of discoveries about the underlying structure of life and the building blocks by which it's made. Recently, scientists created new nucleotides that do not exist in nature and inserted them into a living organism. And now, this: DNA can look like just about anything and can be assembled into many shapes.
It's the latest in a string of discoveries about the underlying structure of life and the building blocks by which it's made. Recently, scientists created new nucleotides that do not exist in nature and inserted them into a living organism. And now, this: DNA can look like just about anything and can be assembled into many shapes.
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Let me know when they can do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The Earth needs more Milla Jovovich.
Re: Yawn... (Score:1)
I'd buy several
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That's dangerous. Putting DNA in a vagina could lead to pregnancy.
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Multipass (Score:5, Funny)
Me fifth element - supreme being. Me protect you.
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Autowash.
Steps to molecular machines? (Score:3)
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That is what DNA does already. It just builds. Macroscopic versions out of the molecules.
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Humor (Score:4, Funny)
This should be a given.. (Score:5, Interesting)
This should be a given, this is how the body makes proteins. The "recipe" is stored in the DNA, the transcriber runs along the DNA making a copy and then it folds into the protein when the copy is complete. A small mistake in the transcription and it doesn't fold into the right protein or doesn't fold at all. This is why protein research is so hard right now, they don't fully understand what governs how the proteins fold.
This research may give them a leg up on understanding that, very cool that they figured out some of the rules.
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They're folding DNA itself, not proteins.
In life, DNA gets translated into RNA, RNA is then grabbed by a ribosome which attaches the correct amino acids. Then the amino acids magically fold into a working protein (hopefully).
Re:This should be a given.. (Score:4, Informative)
But TFA is talking about the conformation (shape) of the DNA strand itself, not the protein structures that the DNA strand is used to make.
In living organisms, the long DNA molecule always forms a double-helix, irrespective of the base-pair sequence within the DNA. DNA double helices do actually twist and wrap into larger-scale structures: specifically by wrapping around histones [wikipedia.org], and then twisting into larger helices that eventually form chromosomes [wikipedia.org]. There are hints that the DNA sequence itself is actually important in controlling how this twisting/packing happens (with ongoing research about how (innapropriately-named) "junk DNA [wikipedia.org]" plays a crucial role). However, despite this influence between sequence and super-structure, DNA strands essentially are just forming double-helices at the lowest level: i.e. two complementary DNA strands are pairing up to make a really-long double-helix.
What TFA is talking about is a field called "DNA nanotechnology", where researchers synthesize non-natural DNA sequences. If cleverly designed, these sequences will, when they do their usual base-pairing, form a structure more complex than the traditional "really-long double-helix". The structures that are designed do not occur naturally. People have created some really complex structures, made entirely using DNA. Again, these are structures made out of DNA (not structures that DNA generates). You can see some examples by searching for "DNA origami [wikipedia.org]". E.g. one of the famous structures was to create a nano-sized smiley face [caltech.edu]; others have 3D geometric shapes [dana-farber.org], nano-boxes [medgadget.com] and bottles [katiephd.com], gear-like [nature.com] constructs, and all kinds of other things.
The 'trick' is to violate the assumptions of DNA base-pairing that occur in nature. In living cells, DNA sequences are created as two long complementary strands, which pair up with each other. The idea in DNA nanotechnology is to create an assortment of strands. None of the strands are perfectly complementary to each other, but 'sub-regions' of some strands are complementary to 'sub-regions' on other strands. As they start pairing-up with each other, this creates cross-connections between all the various strands. The end result (if your design is done correctly) is that the strands spontaneously form a ver well-defined 3D structure, with nanoscale precision. The advantage of this "self-assembly [wikipedia.org]" is that you get billions of copies of the intended structure forming spontaneously and rapidly. Very cool stuff.
This kind of thing has been ongoing since 2006 at least. TFA erroneously implies that this most recent publication invented the field. Actually, this most recent publication is some nice work about how the design process can be made more robust (and software-automated). So, it's a fine paper, but certainly not the first demonstration of artificial 3D DNA nano-objects.
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form a structure more complex than the traditional "really-long double-helix".
I do think TFS is a little misleading, since all the structures are still made out of helices (with bends and junctions and so forth).
wrong (Score:3)
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Without the double helix, it would be to easy to have errors.
Can you please elaborate on that? It sounds cool... is there something specific to the shape of the double helix that makes storage or transcription less error-prone?
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Spiral is the key (Score:2)
DNA shaped like a spiral is the key [wikipedia.org].
Movies! (Score:1)
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2... [nature.com]
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2... [nature.com]
I gotta figger out how to make screensavers......
Cosmic DNA? (Score:4, Informative)
Space dust may store information as a double helix.
Hessdalen light [wikipedia.org]
Mobius! (Score:2)
This certainly looks like woven double helix (Score:2)
I think the title is misleading.
It sure looks like they are using the double helix style of DNA and then weaving that into shapes or wound ribbons.
Am I missing something here?
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Different levels of structure (Score:2)
New shapes and structures? (Score:2)
I will not be satisfied until they spell out METALLICA in DNA. (pre-black album metallica, you know)
Dig a big hole and get ready (Score:1)
GMO's aren't the problem, how we use them is.....now this ?
There's a reason to believe in the complexity of Evolution's tests and trials.
When we start mucking around with building blocks like this let's hope we remember that we don't
really know how this lego set will act once it's built up....really interesting though I must admit.
(GMOs belongs in Labs and Cures, not in crops or Livestock)
Prediction is only novel part of this research (Score:1)
DNA origami is mostly novelty, anyways. Most researchers have moved on to using DNA to build structures that actually do useful things, rather than just look pretty.
design is not the same as produce. (Score:1)
I think is still too early to celebrate the technique, this are mostly just computer predictions that have not yet been proven in the lab, there are a lot of things in biology that are supposed to happen based in computer simulations that simply don't in a flask. If you have a million compounds and dock them to a single active site in a protein you may get around a thousand that are predicted to work inhibiting that site, when you test them you are lucky if a couple really have some kind of significant inhi
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