Frame-guided assembly is a novel assembly method which can control the shape and size of vesicles accurately. It has been reported that the DNA-b-PPO vesicles could be stable over two weeks. In this communication we have introduced restriction sites of EcoR1 in the interior DNA scaffold to the formed vesicles in order to further study their stability. Dynamic light scattering(DLS), transmission electron microscope(TEM) and fluorescence spectrum were used to characterize the digestion process. The final results revealed that the vesicles were still stable even after two weeks cultivated with EcoR1, which suggests potential in future biological applications.
Bo BianYi-Yang ZhangYuan-Chen DongFen WuChao WangShuo WangYun XuDong-Sheng Liu
In recent years, DNA supramolecular hydrogels have attracted much attention due to their injectability, biocompatibility, responsiveness and self-healing properties. In this work, we designed a linear DNA brick containing one duplex with two cytosine（C）-rich sequence on both ends. This brick can first assemble to form duplex under p H 8 condition. After adjusting the p H to 5, the C-rich sequence tends to form intermolecular i-motif structure, which joins the linear DNA molecules together to form interlocked cyclic structures and yield the DNA hydrogel. By adjusting the length and bending curvature of the duplex part of the molecule, one can change the basic unit of the hydrogel structure to tune the properties of the DNA hydrogel.
Liquid crystals (LCs) are often known as electronic displays and have become ubiquitous in our daily life, apart from that, in the past 10 years, LCs have been investigated as exquisitely sensitive reporters for developing new molecular sensing and detection tools. The unique and primary advantage of this class of intriguing materials is the perturbation of the local ordering LCs at mo-lecular scale by bio/chemical species can be communicated within LC molecules and extended over microns, allowing the observation of the optical signals by microscope or even the naked eye. Therefore, it provides a new platform for developing bio/chemical detection and potentially label-free sensing systems.
DNA modified nanoparticles(Au NPs) are an established and widely used type of nucleotide sensor. We sought to improve the design by applying short rigid DNA duplexes near the surface of the Au NPs forming a so called double-anchored Au NP sensor, and compared it with other conventional DNA modified Au NPs. The improved design exhibited higher assembly efficiency, and consequently increased its sensitivity to target DNA.
Xiaozhou MaMiao WangChun ChenMark Antonin IsbellRui WangDongsheng LiuZhongqiang Yang
Coarse-grained（CG） simulations can more efficiently study large conformational changes of biological polymers but usually lose accuracies in the details. Lots of different hybrid models involving multiple different resolutions have been developed to overcome the difficulty. Here we propose a novel effective hybrid CG（hyCG） approach which mixes the fine-grained interaction and its average in CG space to form a more smoothing potential energy surface. The hyCG approximately reproduces the potential of mean force in the CG space, and multiple mixed potentials can be further combined together to form a single effective force field for achieving both high efficiency and high accuracy. We illustrate the hyCG method in Trp-cage and Villin headpiece proteins to exhibit the folding of proteins. The topology of the folding landscape and thus the folding paths are preserved, while the folding is boosted nearly one order of magnitude faster. It indicates that the hyCG approach could be applied as an efficient force field in proteins.
