Chiral DNA Origami Nanotubes with Well-Defined and Addressable Inside and Outside Surfaces.

We report the design and assembly of chiral DNA nanotubes with well-defined and addressable inside and outside surfaces. We demonstrate that the outside surface can be functionalised with a chiral arrangement of gold nanoparticles to create a plasmonic device and that the inside surface can be functionalised with a track for a molecular motor allowing transport of a cargo within the central cavity.

Design of hidden thermodynamic driving for non-equilibrium systems via mismatch elimination during DNA strand displacement.

Recent years have seen great advances in the development of synthetic self-assembling molecular systems. Designing out-of-equilibrium architectures, however, requires a more subtle control over the thermodynamics and kinetics of reactions. We propose a mechanism for enhancing the thermodynamic drive of DNA strand-displacement reactions whilst barely perturbing forward reaction rates: the introduction of mismatches within the initial duplex. Through a combination of experiment and simulation, we demonstrate that displacement rates are strongly sensitive to mismatch location and can be tuned by rational design. By placing mismatches away from duplex ends, the thermodynamic drive for a strand-displacement reaction can be varied without significantly affecting the forward reaction rate. This hidden thermodynamic driving motif is ideal for the engineering of non-equilibrium systems that rely on catalytic control and must be robust to leak reactions.

West-Life: A Virtual Research Environment for structural biology.

The West-Life project (https://about.west-life.eu/) is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Commission to provide data processing and data management services for the international community of structural biologists, and in particular to support integrative experimental approaches within the field of structural biology. It has developed enhancements to existing web services for structure solution and analysis, created new pipelines to link these services into more complex higher-level workflows, and added new data management facilities. Through this work it has striven to make the benefits of European e-Infrastructures more accessible to life-science researchers in general and structural biologists in particular.

Programmable energy landscapes for kinetic control of DNA strand displacement.

DNA is used to construct synthetic systems that sense, actuate, move and compute. The operation of many dynamic DNA devices depends on toehold-mediated strand displacement, by which one DNA strand displaces another from a duplex. Kinetic control of strand displacement is particularly important in autonomous molecular machinery and molecular computation, in which non-equilibrium systems are controlled through rates of competing processes. Here, we introduce a new method based on the creation of mismatched base pairs as kinetic barriers to strand displacement. Reaction rate constants can be tuned across three orders of magnitude by altering the position of such a defect without significantly changing the stabilities of reactants or products. By modelling reaction free-energy landscapes, we explore the mechanistic basis of this control mechanism. We also demonstrate that oxDNA, a coarse-grained model of DNA, is capable of accurately predicting and explaining the impact of mismatches on displacement kinetics.