Engineering Tertiary Chirality in Helical Biopolymers

25 September 2023, Version 1
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

Tertiary chirality describes the handedness of supramolecular assemblies and relies not only on the primary and secondary structures of the building blocks, but also on topological driving forces that have been sparsely characterized. Helical biopolymers, especially DNA, have been extensively investigated as they possess intrinsic chirality that determines the optical, mechanical, and physical properties of the ensuing material. Here we employ the DNA tensegrity triangle as a model system to locate the tipping points in chirality inversion at the tertiary level by X-ray diffraction. We engineer tensegrity triangle crystals with incremental rotational steps between immobile junctions from 3 to 28 base pairs (bp). We construct a mathematical model that accurately predicts and explains the molecular configurations in both this work and previous studies. Our design framework is extendable to other supramolecular assemblies of helical biopolymers and can be used in the design of chiral nanomaterials, optically-active molecules, and mesoporous frameworks.

Keywords

Chirality
DNA Nanotechnology

Supplementary materials

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Supplementary Information and Appendices
Description
Methods, diffraction statistics, supplemental tables and figures, as well as Appendices A-B, covering the mathematical models.
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Supplementary weblinks

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