Nano-objects of desire: Assembling ordered nanostructures in 3-D

Scientists have developed a platform for assembling nanosized material components, or "nano-objects," of very different types—inorganic or organic—into desired 3-D structures. Though self-assembly (SA) has successfully been used to organize nanomaterials of several kinds, the process has been extremely system-specific, generating different structures based on the intrinsic properties of the materials. As reported in a paper published today in Nature Materials, their new DNA-programmable nanofabrication platform can be applied to organize a variety of 3-D materials in the same prescribed ways at the nanoscale (billionths of a meter), where unique optical, chemical, and other properties emerge.