INM - Leibniz Institute for New Materials, Campus D22, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany.
Nanoscale. 2021 May 27;13(20):9371-9380. doi: 10.1039/d0nr06865a.
DNA has become a powerful platform to design functional nanodevices. DNA nanodevices are often composed of self-assembled DNA building blocks that differ significantly from the structure of native DNA. In this study, we present Flow Force Microscopy as a massively parallel approach to study the nanomechanics of DNA self-assemblies on the single-molecular level. The high-throughput experiments performed in a simple microfluidic channel enable statistically meaningful studies with nanometer scale precision in a time frame of several minutes. A surprisingly high flexibility was observed for a typical construct used in DNA origami, reflected in a persistence length of 10.2 nm, a factor of five smaller than for native DNA. The enhanced flexibility is attributed to the discontinuous backbone of DNA self-assemblies that facilitate base pair opening by thermal fluctuations at the end of hybridized oligomers. We believe that the results will contribute to the fundamental understanding of DNA nanomechanics and help to improve the design of DNA nanodevices with applications in biological analysis and clinical research.
DNA 已成为设计功能纳米器件的强大平台。DNA 纳米器件通常由自组装的 DNA 构建块组成，这些构建块与天然 DNA 的结构有很大的不同。在这项研究中，我们提出了流动力显微镜作为一种大规模并行的方法，在单分子水平上研究 DNA 自组装的纳米力学。在简单的微流道中进行的高通量实验能够以纳米级精度在几分钟的时间框架内进行具有统计学意义的研究。在 DNA 折纸术中使用的典型结构中观察到了惊人的高灵活性，体现在 10.2nm 的持久长度上，比天然 DNA 小 5 倍。这种增强的灵活性归因于 DNA 自组装的不连续骨架，它通过杂交寡聚物末端的热波动促进碱基对的打开。我们相信，这些结果将有助于对 DNA 纳米力学的基本理解，并有助于改进 DNA 纳米器件的设计，应用于生物分析和临床研究。
