If you have any questions please contact former Director of CDNA, Professor Kurt Gothelf on kvg@chem.au.dk
Center for DNA Nanotechnology (CDNA) was founded in 2007 as a center of excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (Danmarks Grundforskningsfond). In 2012, the grant from the Danish National Research Foundation was extended by 5 years.
The center was based at the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO) at Aarhus University, Denmark, with three American collaborators at North Carolina State University - Raleigh, Arizona State University and Harvard University. The purpose of the center was to conduct basic research within the field of DNA Nanotechnology and they gathered an interdisciplinary team of around 35 researchers and students from chemistry, physics and molecular biology.
The center exploited the self-assembling capability of oligonucleotides to study and control the assembly of materials at the nanoscale. This research ranges from assembly of nucleotide derivatives on surfaces, DNA-directed chemistry and DNA-based sensors to formation of complex DNA nanostructures and the interactions of such structures with biological systems. Among the key competences present at the center for the formation and characterization of such structures were synthetic organic chemistry, molecular biology, and scanning probe microscopy.
Examples on the research contributions from CDNA were self-assembly of a DNA-origami box with a controllable lid (Nature 2009), single-molecule chemical reactions on DNA origami (Nature Nanotechnology 2010), DNA-templated protein conjugation including antibodies (Nature Chemistry 2014) and self-assembly nanostructures from in vitro transcriped RNA (Science 2014).
