Recent Advances in Nanostructuring of Proteins Using DNA Origami
Special Issue Information
During the past two decades, the nanotechnology of DNA origami has been progressing fast, and showing its potentials on the development of next generation diagnostics and therapeutics. With the help of fully automated design methods, people outside the field now can relatively easily design and fabricate their own DNA origami nanostructures. DNA origami has its unique advantage on addressability, meaning that from the design, researchers know the spatial coordinate of each molecular inside the entire structure. This offers us DNA origami as the ideal nano-platform to precisely organize bioactive macromolecules like proteins and control their patterns. Indeed, different two-dimensional or three-dimensional shapes of DNA origami have recently been utilized for the patterning of ligands of membrane receptors, triggering receptor clustering and the downstream cellular signaling. These studies are together displaying the translational value of DNA origami-based protein nanostructuring, and a review of them would highlight direction for future research.