A team at MIT are developing software that will allow people to play with DNA. When developed, this program will allow people to construct virtual 2D and 3D models and nanoscale tools, in a strategy that is being called DNA origami.
DNA molecules are highly useful in the development of synthetic photocells and targeted drugs among other things. However, the challenge of making new sequences and building DNA models for specific tasks has always been very difficult.
Enter the MIT team led by biological engineer Mark Bathe, who are continuing the work of Paul Rothemund from CalTech and William Shih’s from the Harvard Medical School. This new software is being developed to make it much easier for researchers to predict 3D shapes when working with given DNA templates.
“They’re sort of building blocks, but it’s even more crude because DNA is just a sequence,” Bathe says. “It’s taking the places you would connect the DNA together and predicting with a computer what it would look like in the final shape. The goal is to really have this be in the inverse, so the designer wants to make a box or a basket or a gear and then the program tries different folding combinations to give you the shape you want.”
Unlike protein modelling and other messy challenges in biology, DNA is relatively clean and obedient and can be dealt with mathematically. Bathe hopes this software will also open up the world of DNA origami to non specialists, saying “Once non-specialists can design arbitrary 3D nanostructures using DNA origami, their imaginations can run free.”
“Designers still have to guess the rules and then based on the shape modify the rules to get closer to the shape,” Bathe says, adding “It’s the Holy Grail to say, ‘I want this,’ and then it happens. We’ve made quite some progress already, so I think in the next half year to a year that should be coming out.”
Source:http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/mit-team-developing-dna-origami-software
