Franco Lab @UCLA Exploring how to program dynamic behaviors in biological self-assembly 💡✨ We’re harnessing DNA and RNA to build smart, adaptive materials 🔬🧬 #Biomaterials #DNA #RNA
Elisa Franco
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Particularly proud that the paper includes five undergraduate students from UCLA & Pasadena City College!
There are exciting opportunities to harness our RNA droplets for cellular regulation, as modular recruitment domains incorporated into the nanostars enable selective recruitment of target RNA molecules.
New from us in @pnas.org :
We considered the limits of condensate diversity, and engineered DNA droplets to form 9 distinct, homotypic, coexisting phases. Very hard to do this except with nucleic acids. Probably you can make more than 9. (1/3)
Through RNA sequence design we built up to three distinct types of RNA droplets that can be expressed simultaneously and do not mix. With linker RNA motifs, we organized spatially these distinct droplets to form multi-phase compartments.
🧬 DNA nanostars are great way to build biomolecular condensates. Add an aptamer and you can build "host condensates" that recruit & release targets. But where should the aptamer go? We show that there are several great options in our new @nanoscale-journals.rsc.org paper pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...
We produced micrometer-sized RNA viscoelastic compartments formed by RNA “nanostars”, motifs that fold from a single short RNA molecule (120-300 nt) and interact through loop-loop bonds. Building on previous work with @dimichelelab1.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Some good news today, let's hope other countries follow suit!
www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
RNA is more than genetic information: it can be a tool for cellular architects. In our new paper, we engineer RNA motifs to physically reorganize intracellular space in living mammalian cells. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We can control where RNA droplets form (nucleus vs cytoplasm) by tuning design parameters of the nanostars (arm length, arm number, loop bonds), with large and “sticky” nanostars preferentially creating nuclear compartments.
