Construction of geometrical objects from polynucleotides

DETAILED DESCRIPTION By means of the present invention, DNA, RNA and similar polymers may be produced by synthesizing a double stranded segment, preferably with a loop at one end, cleaving the end of the double stranded portion having the loop, and ligating to the cleaved end a new double stranded segment, previously synthesized to have an end which will ligate to the cleaved end of the first segment and to have another loop at another end having a sequence recognizable by a predetermined restriction endonuclease, the ligation causing an increase in the size of the structure.
The cleavage of the first loop is accomplished in a controlled manner by creating a unique site for a restriction enzyme which does not have its enzyme recognition site reformed after ligation of the new segment of polynucleotide.
This process may be repeated as many times as desired to produce almost any structure one can imagine.
It is particularly useful for preparation of two and three dimensional structures.
Furthermore, by leaving one or more restriction sites in the structure, it may be modified at a later time after manufacturing.
Thus, modifications may be made to fine tune the structure once it is in use or to fix it in a particular position.
The structure being formed may have multiple numbers of a particular restriction site.
This permits mass additions to the preexisting structure and lends itself very well to automation and mass production using the techniques known in the fields of solid phase nucleic acid synthesis and solid phase peptide synthesis.
The ability to construct functional artificial components on a nanometer scale from polynucleotides will provide the capability of creating artificial tools and reagents able to mimic the function of natural subcellular organelles and to perform other useful functions, not necessarily present in the natural state, for diagnostic, therapeutic or industrial purposes.
For example, such a construct would provide a useful three-dimensional scaffolding upon which enzymatic or antibody binding domains may be linked to provide high density multivalent processing sites to link to and solubilize otherwise insoluble enzymes, or to entrap, protect and deliver a variety of molecular species, and the like