RNA Origami: A new way to design nanostructures

Cody Geary, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Aarhus University

Artificial DNA and RNA structures have been used as scaffolds for a variety of nanoscale devices. In comparison  to DNA  structures,  RNA structures  have been limited  in size,  but they  also have advantages: RNA can fold during transcription and thus can be genetically encoded and expressed in cells. We introduce an architecture for designing artificial RNA structures that fold from a single strand, in which arrays of antiparallel RNA helices are precisely organized by RNA tertiary motifs and  a  new type of  crossover pattern. We  constructed RNA tiles  that assemble into  hexagonal lattices and demonstrated that lattices can be made by annealing and/or cotranscriptional folding. Tiles can be scaled up to 660  nucleotides in length,  reaching a size comparable to that of large natural ribozymes.

Cody  Geary  is a  Carlsberg Foundation  Postdoctoral  Fellow  working at  the  Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center at Aarhus University, advised by Ebbe Andersen. He currently is a  visiting postdoc at Caltech, in the lab of Paul Rothemund. Cody works on developing RNA nanostructures that fold up from a single strand of RNA. The designs, dubbed 'RNA Origami', are being developed in collaboration with Paul Rothemund at Caltech and Ebbe Andersen at Aarhus University. Cody obtained his B.S. in Chemistry at Caltech in 2003, and his PhD at UC Santa Barbara in 2010 under the advisement of Luc Jaeger.