Arktos: a simple tool for the design of polyhedral DNA nanostructures

Abstract

DNA nanostructures are a class of self-assembling nanomaterials with a wide range of potential applications in biomedicine and nanotechnology. The history of DNA nanotechnology can be traced back to the 1980s with the development of simple DNA polyhedra using either human intuition or simple algorithms. Today the field is dominated by DNA origami constructs to such an extent that the original algorithms used to design non-origami nanostructures have been lost. In this work we describe Arktos: an algorithm developed to design simple DNA polyhedra without the use of DNA origami. Arktos designs sequences predicted to fold into a desired structure using simulated annealing optimization. As a proof-of-concept, we used Arktos to design a simple DNA tetrahedron. The generated oligonucleotide sequences were synthesized and experimentally validated via polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, indicating that they fold into the desired structure. These results demonstrate that Arktos can be used to design custom DNA polyhedra as per the needs of the research community.