A General Design Method for Scaffold-Free DNA Wireframe Nanostructures

In the area of DNA nanotechnology, approaches to composing wireframe nanostructures exclusively from short oligonucleotides, without a coordinating long scaffold strand, have been proposed by Goodman et al. (2004) and Wang et al. (2019). We present a general design method that extends these special cases to arbitrary wireframes, in the sense of graphs linearly embedded in 2D or 3D space. The method works in linear time in the size of the given wireframe model and is already available for use in the online design tool DNAforge. We also interpret the method in terms of topological graph embeddings, which opens up further research opportunities in developing this design approach.