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Collective helicity switching of a DNA–coat assembly

Nature Nanotechnology volume 12, pages 551–556 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Hierarchical assemblies of biomolecular subunits can carry out versatile tasks at the cellular level with remarkable spatial and temporal precision1,2. As an example, the collective motion and mutual cooperation between complex protein machines mediate essential functions for life, such as replication3, synthesis4, degradation5, repair6 and transport7. Nucleic acid molecules are far less dynamic than proteins and need to bind to specific proteins to form hierarchical structures. The simplest example of these nucleic acid-based structures is provided by a rod-shaped tobacco mosaic virus, which consists of genetic material surrounded by coat proteins8. Inspired by the complexity and hierarchical assembly of viruses, a great deal of effort has been devoted to design similarly constructed artificial viruses9,10. However, such a wrapping approach makes nucleic acid dynamics insensitive to environmental changes. This limitation generally restricts, for example, the amplification of the conformational dynamics between the right-handed B form to the left-handed Z form of double-stranded deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)11,12. Here we report a virus-like hierarchical assembly in which the native DNA and a synthetic coat undergo repeated collective helicity switching triggered by pH change under physiological conditions. We also show that this collective helicity inversion occurs during translocation of the DNA–coat assembly into intracellular compartments. Translating DNA conformational dynamics into a higher level of hierarchical dynamics may provide an approach to create DNA-based nanomachines.

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Figure 1: Self-assembly of coat molecules driven by DNA and collective helicity switching of the DNA–coat assembly.
Figure 2: Dimension and packing arrangement of the helical DNA–coat assembly at pH 7.4.
Figure 3: Collective helicity switching triggered by a pH change.
Figure 4: Collective helicity inversion driven by translocation from the extracellular matrix to intracellular compartments.

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Change history

  • 11 April 2017

    In the version of this Letter originally published, Fig. 1 contained chemical structures that were not drawn in our house stlye. These structures have been replaced in all versions of the Letter.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the 1000 Program, and the National Natural Science Foundation China (no. 51473062, no. 21574055, no. 21634005 and no. 21550110493).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials, College of Chemistry, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

    Yongju Kim, Huichang Li, Ying He, Xi Chen, Xiaoteng Ma & Myongsoo Lee

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Contributions

Y.K. designed and performed most of the experiments, H.L. synthesized molecules and carried out AFM experiments, Y.H. performed TEM experiments, X.C. carried out ITC experiments, X.M. performed cell cultures and imaging experiments and M.L. developed the concept, supervised the research and wrote the manuscript with input from all the authors.

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Correspondence to Myongsoo Lee.

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Kim, Y., Li, H., He, Y. et al. Collective helicity switching of a DNA–coat assembly. Nature Nanotech 12, 551–556 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.42

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