Tag Archives: Ngo Yin Wong

Nano-encrypted morse code in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)

This is not the first time something has written something into DNA. (J. Craig Venter included a quote from a James Joyce work into the DNA (mostly for fun) of one of his synthetic biology projects as per my Mar. 16, 2011 posting about Venter and the James Joyce estate’s copyright claim.) However, Professor Yi Lu and his team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had a somewhat different purpose in mind when they encrypted morse code into DNA. From the Mar. 12, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

Hidden in a tiny tile of interwoven DNA is a message. The message is simple, but decoding it unlocks the secret of dynamic nanoscale assembly.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have devised a dynamic and reversible way to assemble nanoscale structures and used it to encrypt a Morse code message. Led by Yi Lu, the Schenck Professor of Chemistry, the team published its development in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (“Nano-Encrypted Morse Code: A Versatile Approach to Programmable and Reversible Nanoscale Assembly and Disassembly”).

The Mar. 11, 2013 University of Illinois news release, which originated the news item and was written by Liz Ahlberg, explains how this ‘morse code’ encryption will lead to programmable assembly and disassembly,

“I think a critical challenge facing nanoscale science and engineering is reversible assembly,” Lu said. “Researchers are now pretty good at putting components in places they desire, but not very good at putting something on and taking it off again. Many applications need dynamic assembly. You don’t just want to assemble it once, you want to do it repeatedly, and not only using the same component, but also new components.”

The group took advantage of a chemical system common in biology. The protein streptavidin binds very strongly to the small organic molecule biotin – it grabs on and doesn’t let go. A small chemical tweak to biotin yields a molecule that also binds to streptavidin, but holds it loosely.

The researchers started with a template of DNA origami – multiple strands of DNA woven into a tile. They “wrote” their message in the DNA template by attaching biotin-bound DNA strands to specific locations on the tiles that would light up as dots or dashes. Meanwhile, DNA bound to the biotin derivative filled the other positions on the DNA template.

Then they bathed the tiles in a streptavidin solution. The streptavidin bonded to both the biotin and its derivative, making all the spots “light up” under an atomic force microscope and camouflaging the message. To reveal the hidden message, the researchers then put the tiles in a solution of free biotin. Since it binds to streptavidin so much more strongly, the biotin effectively removed the protein from the biotin derivative, so that only the DNA strands attached to the unaltered biotin kept hold of their streptavidin. The Morse code message, “NANO,” was clearly readable under the microscope.

The researchers also demonstrated non-Morse characters, creating tiles that could switch back and forth between a capital “I” and a lowercase “i” as streptavidin and biotin were alternately added. (See an animation of the process.)

All the work leading is to this (from the news release),

“This is an important step forward for nanoscale assembly,” Lu said. “Now we can encode messages in much smaller scale, which is interesting. There’s more information per square inch. But the more important advance is that now that we can carry out reversible assembly, we can explore much more versatile, much more dynamic applications.”

Next, the researchers plan to use their technique to create other functional systems. Lu envisions assembling systems to perform a task in chemistry, biology, sensing, photonics or other area, then replacing a component to give the system an additional function. Since the key to reversibility is in the different binding strengths, the technique is not limited to the biotin-streptavidin system and could work for a variety of molecules and materials.

“As long as the molecules used in the assembly have two different affinities, we can apply this particular concept into other templates or processes,” Lu said.

Interested parties can find the paper here,

Nano-Encrypted Morse Code: A Versatile Approach to Programmable and Reversible Nanoscale Assembly and Disassembly by Ngo Yin Wong, Hang Xing, Li Huey Tan, and Yi Lu. J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2013, 135 (8), pp 2931–2934 DOI: 10.1021/ja3122284 Publication Date (Web): February 2, 2013 Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society

The article is behind a paywall.