Bottom Up Construction of Dynamic Biomolecular Materials

Cells develop, grow and reconfigure their shape via the interplay of molecular materials and circuits. Cytoskeletal scaffolds, for example, continuously adapt their shape in response to the outputs of signaling pathways and gene networks.  We want to harness this general architecture and develop artificial materials with similar adaptation properties, bypassing the complexity of the cellular environment.  I will describe the construction of minimal dynamic molecular scaffolds with nucleic acid nanostructures whose assembly is directed by nucleic acid signals and circuits. Nucleic acids are an ideal biomolecular material due to the programmability of their base pair interactions. I will discuss in particular the control of growth and decay in a system of DNA nanotubes, a synthetic analog to cellular microtubules.