UT Austin researchers create nanoscale Longhorn using DNA origami

[00:00:00]It's a combination of science and art, folding DNA like origami, and it could help fight cancer.

[00:00:07]>> Researchers at UT Austin are reshaping the building blocks of life and creating devices. K X A N senior science reporter Eric Henderickson explores the microscopic world of delicate folding and the one creation taking a familiar shape.

[00:00:26]>> When you think of DNA, we don't think of making things with DNA.

[00:00:30]>> One of the main advantage of DNA origami field is that you can make them into different shapes and design.

[00:00:35]>> We're making things at the nano scale, it's hard to make lots of them, and now we're able to make them more efficiently and put them into bigger materials.

[00:00:44]I'm Alex Marci, I'm a professor here at UT Austin in mechanical engineering. We have this ability to design sequences and synthesize specific sequences that all come together like Legos to make these nano scale devices.

[00:00:59]>> We have this like long strand of DNA which we call a scaffold strand.

[00:01:03]>> I'm James Houston, I'm a fourth year PhD at UT Austin. We add hundreds of staple strands to the scaffold strand and these staple [music] strands force the scaffold to fold if you will into this like specific shape that we design kind of the same way you have like paper origami. I was [music] responsible for designing this longhorn and I guess making it come to life.

[00:01:25]>> I'm forecasting on using these DNA origami for delivering chemotherapy drugs.

[00:01:31]>> My name is Meisam Mohammadi and I'm a third year PhD student working in nano assembly lab. We're trying to develop new techniques in order to coat them and protect [music] them to make them targeted to cancer cells and avoid you know harming the the healthy cells.

[00:01:46]>> The way it works, it comes here if you incubate it and let it sit for like 1 hour, it will come here and it will reside between these double helices. As this one degrades, so it will release the the dark molecules.

[00:02:00]>> We want to understand the factors that go into the assembly and make them more efficient. Usually it takes multiple days. My students were able to get that down to a few hours and actually make it more efficient.

[00:02:12]>> Get more people knowing about Yeah, we can use DNA as a structural material to build not only the longhorn, but you know, maybe like drug delivery carriers and other types of things, you know, we can actually advance this field and longhorn is just a small step in what's to come, I think, in the future.

[00:02:32]>> And that was Eric Hendrickson reporting the longhorn created in the lab may be the smallest logo ever made, made entirely by of DNA, and 10 million of these tiny structures could fit in a single grain of sand.