Defect Patterns in DNA-Linked Crystals (IMAGE)
Caption
The Penn team's discovery started with an unusual observation about one of their previous studies, which dealt with a reconfigurable crystalline structure the team had made using DNA-coated plastic spheres, each 400 nanometers wide. These structures initially assemble into floppy crystals with square-shaped patterns, but, in a process similar to heat-treating steel, their patterns can be coaxed into more stable, triangular configurations.
Surprisingly, the structures they were making in the lab were better than the ones their computer simulations predicted would result. The simulated crystals were full of defects, places where the crystalline pattern of the spheres was disrupted, but the experimentally grown crystals were all perfectly aligned. Here, different colors represent different crystalline patterns.
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University of Pennsylvania
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