Programmed self-assembly of strands of nucleic acid has proved highly effective for creating a wide range of structures with desired shapes1–25. A particularly successful implementation is DNA origami, in which a long scaffold strand is folded by hundreds of short auxiliary strands into a complex shape9, 14–16,18–21,25. Modular strategies are in principle simpler and more versatile and have been used to assemble DNA2–5,8,10–13,17,23 or RNA7,22 tiles into periodic3,4,7,22 and algorithmic5 two-dimensional lattices, extended ribbons10,12 and tubes4,12,13, three-dimensional crystals17, polyhedra11 and simple finite two-dimensional shapes7,8. But creating finite yet complex shapes from a large number of uniquely addressable tiles remains challenging. Here we solve this problem with the simplest tile form, a ‘single-stranded tile’ (SST) that consists of a 42-base strand of DNA composed entirely of concatenated sticky ends and that binds to four local neighbours during self-assembly12. Although ribbons and tubes with controlled circumferences12 have been created using the SST approach, we extend it to assemble complex two-dimensional shapes and tubes from hundreds (in some cases more than one thousand) distinct tiles. Our main design feature is a self-assembled rectangle that serves as a molecular canvas, with each of its constituent SST strands—folded into a 3nm-by-7 nm tile and attached to four neighbouring tiles—acting as a pixel. A desired shape, drawn on the canvas, is then produced by one-pot annealing of all those strands that correspond to pixels covered by the target shape; the remaining strands are excluded. We implement the strategy with a master strand collection that corresponds to a 310-pixel canvas, and then use appropriate strand subsets to construct 107 distinct and complex two-dimensional shapes, thereby establishing SST assembly as a simple, modular and robust framework for constructing nanostructures with prescribed shapes from short synthetic DNA strands.

We describe a method to form custom-shaped inorganic oxide nanostructures by using DNA nanostructure templates. We show that a DNA nanostructure can modulate the rate of chemical vapor deposition of SiO2 and TiO2 with nanometer-scale spatial resolution. The resulting oxide nanostructure inherits its shape from the DNA template. This method generates both positive-tone and negative-tone patterns on a wide range of substrates and is compatible with conventional silicon nanofabrication processes. Our result opens the door to the use of DNA nanostructures as general-purpose templates for high-resolution nanofabrication.

We report the design and construction of a nanometer-sized tetrahedron from a single strand of DNA that is 286 nucleotides long. The formation of the tetrahedron was verified by restriction enzyme digestion, Ferguson analysis, and atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging. We further demonstrate that synthesis of the tetrahedron can be easily scaled up through in vivo replication using standard molecular cloning techniques. We found that the in vivo replication efficiency of the tetrahedron is significantly higher in comparison to in vitro replication using rolling-circle amplification (RCA). Our results suggest that it is now possible to design and replicate increasingly complex, single-stranded DNA nanostructures in vivo.