Building and evaluating nucleic acid nanostructures for in vivo applications

Nanostructures built from nucleic acids like DNA and RNA offer immense potential for biological and biomedical applications. They are highly customizable and can be tailored to interact with a wide range of molecules, making them ideal for targeted drug delivery and biomedical imaging. However, with so many possibilities it can be difficult to optimize the right combination of features for a given application and time-consuming to verify their performance in vivo.

Langlois et al. provide a comprehensive toolkit for developing nucleic acid nanostructures for in vivo applications.

“There has not been a comprehensive review connecting what is known about specific design features of nucleic acid nanostructures with their resulting outcomes in a living system,” said author Nicole Langlois.

“There are endless design possibilities for building these nanostructures and adding on functional motifs, so it is important to know where to start in the design process,” added author Kristine Ma.

The authors describe the different nucleic acids that have been employed in nanostructures and the range of features they are capable of. They discuss methods for analyzing these features both in vitro and in vivo, and how those analyses translate to complex biological environments. For practical applications, the authors summarize how nanostructures can be developed with these interactions in mind. They conclude with a call for further research.

“As the field progresses forward to more translatable applications, it is critical that more studies are conducted in this realm to improve standardization,” said Langlois. “Our review aims to draw attention toward this important goal.”

Source: “Nucleic acid nanostructures for in vivo applications: The influence of morphology on biological fate,” by Nicole I. Langlois, Kristine Y. Ma, and Heather A. Clark, Applied Physics Reviews (2023). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0121820 .