Topological and Protein-Functionalised DNA hydrogels*

The Watson-Crick base pairing make DNA an ideal building block for smart biomaterials. Recently there has been an increasing effort to design and characterise hydrogels made by DNA nanostars. In spite of this, their functionalisation using proteins or enzymes has been overlooked so far.

In this poster, I shed new light on this by employing experimental and computational methods. First, I perform experimental design of active DNA hydrogels with a controlled tuning of their viscoelasticity in time by the action of proteins that cut, bend, and in general alter the topology of the network. Second, I present our attempt to characterize from simulations the geometrical features of this system and rationalise the observations from experiments. Finally, based on this combined approach, I introduce two particularly exciting soft materials obtained by (1) the hybridization of DNA with peptides and (2) the self-assembly of hydrogels made by different populations of DNA nanostars with different sticky ends.

This work encourages further studies on this class of materials and paves the way in drug delivery and tissue regeneration applications.