Design of the DNA dodecahedron

To generate the 20 trisoligonucleotides for the self-assembly of the DNA dodecahedron 30 independent 15 bp DNA sequences with narrow melting points were calculated using the program SequenceGenerator of Banzhaf et al.[45] The 30 sequences were assigned to the 30 edges of the dodecahedron (Table 2). As a result, a set of twenty trisoligonucleotides was determined in such a way that each trisoligonucleotide represents a vertex of the dodecahedron and the complementary "arms" of neighboring trisoligonucleotides form duplexes, representing the edges of the dodecahedron.


Table 2  Trisoligonucleotide sequences assigned to each of the 20 vertices of the dodecahedron, connectivities as depicted in the Schlegel representation (right). Each 3' end is attached to trislinker 1 via a phosphodiester linkage.