DNA nanostructures have attracted great attention due to their precisely controllable geometry and great potential in various areas including bottom-up self-assembly. However, construction of higher-order DNA nanoarchitectures with individual DNA nanostructures is often hampered with the purity and quantity of these "bricks". Here, we introduced size exclusion chromatography (SEC) to prepare highly purified tetrahedral DNA nanocages in large scale and demonstrated that precise quantification of DNA nanocages was the key to the formation of higher-order DNA nanoarchitectures. We successfully purified a series of DNA nanocages with different sizes, including seven DNA tetrahedra with different edge lengths (7, 10, 13, 17, 20, 26, 30 bp) and one trigonal bipyramid with a 20-bp edge. These highly purified and aggregation-free DNA nanocages could be self-assembled into higher-order DNA nanoarchitectures with extraordinarily high yields (98% for dimer and 95% for trimer). As a comparison, unpurified DNA nanocages resulted in low yield of 14% for dimer and 12% for trimer, respectively. AFM images cleraly presented the characteristic structure of monomer, dimer and trimer, impling the purified DNA nanocages well-formed the designed nanoarchitectures. Therefore, we have demonstrated that highly purified DNA nanocages are excellent "bricks" for DNA nanotechnology and show great potential in various applications of DNA nanomaterials.
Keywords: DNA tetrahedron; highly ordered DNA nanoarchitectures; purification; quantification; size exclusion chromatography.