Isothermal approach to assemble spatial DNA nanotubes for drug delivery

Abstract

DNA Nanostructures assembled from artificial single stranded DNA provided an engineering method to fabricate highly biocompatible spatial objects, which have potentials applications as drug delivery vehicles and templates for the patterning of biological molecules as biosensor for active hepatic targeting drug delivery. Most DNA nanostructures are constructed by annealing process, which means some thermal sensitive drugs and biosensors made from peptides or proteins in the structure will be denatured during fabrication. Fabrication of DNA nanostructure under isothermal condition remains challenging. Herein we report a simple and cost-effective method to form DNA nanotubes in the presence of urea with only two single-stranded tiles (SST) at room temperature. The constructed DNA nanotubes were observed and analyzed by atomic force microscopy (AFM). Experimental results show the feasibility and stability of our method. This method avoids traditional annealing procedure and will provide possibility to further assembly nano-scale structures in vivo.