Hosted by: Oleg Gang

Rational, de novo design of RNA nanostructures can potentially integrate a wide array of structural and functional diversities. Such nanostructures have great promises in biomedical applications. Despite of impressive progress in this field, all RNA nanomotifs (tiles or building blocks) reported so far are not geometrically well-defined. They are generally flexible and can only assemble into a mixture of complexes with different sizes. To achieve defined structures, multiple tiles with different sequences are needed. In our study, we have de nova designed a RNA nanomotif that can homo-oligomerize into a uniform RNA nanostructure. We use PAGE, AFM and Cryo-EM to analyze our data. Based on this work, we further developed single stranded RNA tiles. These artificial single stranded RNA tiles can self-assemble into well-defined 1D, 2D and 3D structures. We believe that development along this line would help RNA nanotechnology to reach the structural control that currently associates with DNA nanotechnology.