DNA nanotech allows you to make artificial cells that divide into different compartments without the need for membranes, British scientists show in JACS.

If you decorate artificial cells with compartments – like organelles in biological versions – you’d usually pick membranes based on polymers, fats or protein membranes. You can internally give these a heterogeneous architecture, allowing specific substances to enter or leave the ‘compartments’. However, having such an architecture in cells without any membranes was not yet available, until Adrian Leathers, Lorenzo Di Michele and colleagues at the University of Cambridge recently devised a way in which you use DNA. They managed to create up to five separate compartments and managed to get a fluorescent RNA aptamer synthesised in the nucleus that moved to the outer shell.

To build such a cell, the researchers used DNA strands. They first made a core of cross-linked DNA molecules, with a cholesterol molecule at each end. At one end there is a hook where you can attach the base strand, which makes the whole unit programmable with so-called patterned strands which differ in length. The longer the strand, the slower and stronger it will bind to the core.