A Dna Origami of Slovenia in Nano Dimensions

The principle of the rapidly evolving DNA nanotechnology is the design of nanostructures based only on the Watson-Crick base pairing and the oligonucleotide sequence. DNA origami technique is able to produce a variety of different shapes by constraining a long single stranded DNA molecule with a large number of short oligonucleotides. We designed 227 short oligonucleotides in order to scaffold the long strand of M13 bacteriophage single-stranded DNA into the shape of Slovenia. After annealing DNA origamis of Slovenia were observed by atomic force microscopy showing that most of the structures followed the design. Our results demonstrate that DNA origami technique can be used for construction of irregular asymmetric shapes with curvy edges and prove the feasibility of this technique.