The work has occupied a large fraction of my lab for past two years, included both huge modeling effort (by students/postdocs J Evans, M Sample S Roy, M Matthies) and experiments (H Liu and T Diep) We also worked iwth J Hihath and Y Ke's lab for help with carbon nanotube scaffolding
Thank you @mskcancercenter.bsky.social for highlighting our work on #viralmimicry in our genome, its evolution, the selective forces on it, and its potential role in cancer.
A great years long collaborative effort with @petrsulc.bsky.social, @daniel-decarvalho.bsky.social, & many great colleagues!
The platform can also be used to make crystals, such us the Sponge crystal:
🧪🧬 You can now play Minecraft with DNA nanotechnology! In our latest preprint we introduce DNA polycubes platform: A modeling driven system, where we use SAT-solvers+multiscale simulations to design 3D finite-size structures that assemble in high yield
chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10....
and it can also be used to design dynamic reconfigurable structures, using "cube displacement" reaction, a 3D analogue of the often-used DNA strand displacement used for molecular computing:
We are happy to announce the oxDNA workshop 2026 at Arizona State University in February 16th - 20th . It will be a three day conference followed by a two-day hackathon of coding up new features in oxDNA and associated tools, as well as tutorials on its usage:
sulcgroup.github.io/oxdnaworkshop/
As has become our yearly tradition with John Russo and his team at Sapienza University, there is always a Christmas-themed video based on current patchy self-assembly problem that we work on. The problems (and the videos!) get more sophisticated every year: www.youtube.com/watch?v=keZI...
Finally, the cubes can have multiple applications in nanoscale manufacturing. For example, they can be used to create 3D carbon nanotube circuits, as shown below where a cube is used to scaffold a 3D carbon nanotube junction for scaling up nanoelectronics manufacturing to 3D:
Our modeling platform finds "minimal assembly kit", the smallest number of cubic shaped DNA origami blocks, interacting with single-stranded overhangs, that are needed to reliably assemble into target prescribed 3D shape. To demonstrate of our platform we build Menger cube (1.9 GDa) fractal:
