Solidifying framework nucleic acids

A study offers a novel strategy to create silica-DNA structural composites with highly programmable morphologies. This approach opens up new possibilities to concreate DNA nanostructures with a variety of materials. It demonstrates that calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, ferric oxide and other metallic oxides, besides silica, could also be utilized to obtain DNA-inorganic composites, by introducing cations and corresponding anions. Another new direction is the construction of higher order hybrid nanostructures. Multi-layered/multi-component hybrid materials may be achieved by a stepwise deposition of different materials to further expand the mineralizing diversity. Such capabilities shed new light on engineering highly programmable solid-state nanopores with hierarchical features, new porous materials with designed structural periodicity, cavity and functionality, photonic crystals, plasmonic and metamaterials with long-range orders.