Thermodynamics and Kinetics of DNA Tile Binding During the Nucleation Process of DNA Self-Assembly Fan Hong#, Shuoxing Jiang, Hao Yan*, Yan Liu* Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics, The Biodesign Institute, and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, United States #Poster Presenter(PhD student): fhong5@asu.edu *Corresponding authors: Hao.Yan@asu.edu, yan_liu@asu.edu. Abstract Thermodynamic Study Table 2. Arrhenius fitting results. • DX (double crossover) DNA tile is the most widely used building block for 2D array formation, nanotube engineering, and algorithmic self-assembly. The versatilities of DX tiles predominantly rely on the thermodynamic and kinetic control of binding during the assembly process. • Fluorescence dye is introduced to preformed DNA structure to monitor binding process in real time and thermodynamic and kinetic parameters are obtained for 4 kinds of binding scenarios during the nucleation process of DNA self-assembly. • DX tile binding behaves differently in thermodynamics and kinetics among 4 kinds of scenarios, even with the same number of sticky ends due to the different geometric arrangement. • The relative rates of nucleation process in different directions affects the circumference of DNA nanotubes. ln(A) Ea (kcal/mol) 2B-S 38.5±0.5 13.8±0.3 2B-L 25.5±0.7 6.9±0.4 3B 32.1±0.4 10.2±0.2 4B 36.4±0.6 12.4±0.4 Figure 5. Arrhenius plot of DX tile binding in all scenarios in this study. Rate constants were measured at 5 different temperatures. The Relative rates of Nucleation Process Affects the Circumference of DNA Nanotube The Nucleation Process of DX Tile Self-Assembly Figure 3. Illustration of a typical FRET data processing for DX binding of 2BL scenario. θ, normalized FRET efficiency. Figure 6. The nucleation process controls DNA nanotube formation. (A) The scheme of DNA nanotube formation process. (B-C) AFM images of opened nanotubes that are 10 and 6 tiles in circumference respectively. The scale bars are 50 nm. (D) Circumference distribution of DNA nanotubes formed at 20, 24, 28°C. As the assembly temperature increases, the main circumference of the formed tubes increases as well. Table 1. Melting temperature and thermodynamic data of DX tile binding at all 4 scenarios. W/2 (°C) ΔH (kcal/mol) ΔS (kcal/mol*K) TΔS (kcal/mol) ΔG (25 oC) (kcal/mol) 2B-S 28.2±0.1 28.3±0.1 4.0±0.1 -92.1±3.6 -0.272±0.012 -81.0±3.6 -11.1±0.1 2B-L 32.9±0.1 32.9±0.1 4.3±0.1 -108.8±0.8 -0.321±0.003 -95.7±0.8 -13.0±0.1 3B 37.8±0.1 37.9±0.1 3.7±0.2 -110.8±4.6 -0.323±0.015 -96.3±4.5 -14.5±0.1 4B 40.6±0.1 40.7±0.1 3.0±0.1 -124.6±10.7 -0.364±0.034 -108.5±10.2 -16.1±0.5 Tm (°C) Figure 1. The nucleation process of DX tile self-assembly and DNA helix model of favorable binding steps in this study. The green dots and red five star indicate 6-FAM and TAMRA modification, respectively AFM Characterization Tf (°C) Kinetic Study References Figure 2. The morphology observations of the multi-tile intermediates before and after DX tile binding by AFM. All the scale bars are 20 nm. Figure 4. A) Kinetic measurements and non-linear fitting. B) The rate constants of 2B-S and 2B-L binding. 1. Rothemund, Paul WK, et al. "Design and characterization of programmable DNA nanotubes." J. Am. Chem. Soc. 126.50 (2004): 16344-16352. 2. Fu, Tsu Ju, and Nadrian C. Seeman. "DNA double-crossover molecules."Biochemistry 32.13 (1993): 3211-3220. 3. Evans, Constantine G., Rizal F. Hariadi, and Erik Winfree. "Direct atomic force microscopy observation of DNA tile crystal growth at the single-molecule level." J. Am. Chem. Soc. 134.25 (2012): 10485-10492. Acknowledgement: This work was supported by grants from the Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research and National Science Foundation to Y.L. and H.Y.