Nanostructures containing PNA joining or functional elements

Abstract

Nanostructures are made that include at least one species of assembly unit comprising a peptide nucleic acid (PNA). PNA assembly units may have one or two PNA joining elements. In addition, the PNA assembly units may contain structural elements, and/or other functional or joining elements. The nanostructure is suitably prepared using a staged assembly method. In this method, a nanostructure intermediate having at least one unbound joining element is contacted with an assembly unit having a plurality of different joining elements. None of the joining elements of the assembly unit can interact with itself or with another joining element of the same assembly unit. However, one of the joining elements of the assembly unit can interact with the unbound joining element of the nanostructure intermediate, so that the assembly unit is non-covalently bound to the nanostructure intermediate to form a new nanostructure intermediate for use in subsequent cycles. Unbound assembly units are removed and the cycles is repeated for a sufficient number of cycles to form a nanostructure. In one specific method, the complementary joining elements in at least one cycle are PNA joining elements.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.