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DNA'origami'is a technique for shaping long strands of DNA into nearly any three-dimensional structure 1. With their recent publication in Science, Langecker et al. 2 reveal the potential of this approach for a new set of applications centered on membrane pores. The paper describes a transmembrane channel made entirely from DNA and DNA-bound cholesterol moieties. As DNA nanostructures can be readily engineered because of the relatively simple rules that govern their folding, membrane channels with customized properties could find uses as biosensors and nucleic acid or protein sequencers.

In DNA origami, a single-stranded DNA, often obtained from the M13 phage genome, is folded by hundreds of'staples'. The staples are short, single-stranded oligonucleotides that are complementary to two or more sequences in the scaffold and can therefore crosslink distant sites. With the help of computer programs …