RCA strands as scaffolds to create nanoscale shapes by a few staple strands.

Thousands of nucleotide(nt)-long single strand DNAs, generated from rolling-circle-amplification (RCA), were used as scaffolds to create DNA nanoscale wires and plates with a few short staple strands by following the origami design principle with a crossover at 1.5 turns. The core sequence of the circle template, for producing tens and hundreds of tandemly repeated copies of it by RCA, was designed according to Seeman's sequence design principle for nucleic acid structural engineering (Seeman, N. C. J. Biomol. Struct. Dyn. 1990, 8, 573). The significance for folding the RCA products into nanoscale shapes lies in the design flexibility of both staple and scaffold strand codes, simplicity of a few short staple strands to fold the periodic sequence of RCA products, and lower cost.