Designer nanoscale DNA assemblies programmed from the top down

Simplifying DNA origami design Many intricate nanostructures have been made with DNA origami. This process occurs when a long DNA scaffold develops a particular shape after hybridization with short staple strands. Most designs, however, require a difficult iterative procedure of refining the base pairing. Veneziano et al. now report algorithms that automate the design of arbitrary DNA wireframe structures. Synthesizing and structurally characterizing a variety of nanostructures allowed for verification of the algorithms' accuracy. Science , this issue p. 1534