UC San Diego

Nucleic acid has emerged as a new biomaterial to construct new functional biomaterials through mainly Watson-Crick base pairing between complementary sequences. Different from past efforts that used DNA and RNA largely separately to create nucleic acid nano-assemblies, this dissertation outlines a new research direction that sought to assemble discrete DNA and RNA modules to RNA-DNA hybrid nanoparticles. The new direction that marries the structural diversified RNA motifs as architectural joints and chemical flexible DNA modules as functional components gives rise to nanoparticle entities enriched with structural varieties and functional potentials at the sub-10 nanometer scale. The screening methods and multi-step assembly strategy described in the dissertation laid the foundation for designing and preparing complex RNA-DNA hybrid nanoparticles, as well as composite materials based on RNA-DNA hybrid nanoparticles.