Planting the seed for DNA nanoconstructs that grow to the
micron scale

A team of nanobiotechnologists at Harvard’s Wyss
Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute (DFCI) led by Wyss Founding Core Faculty member
William Shih, Ph.D., has devised a programmable DNA self-assembly
strategy that solves the key challenge of robust nucleation control
and paves the way for applications such as ultrasensitive
diagnostic biomarker detection and scalable fabrication of
micrometer-sized structures with nanometer-sized
features.