Overview
DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology melds two tales of DNA. One is a look at the first 35 years of DNA nanotechnology to better appreciate what lies ahead in this emerging field. The other story looks back 4 billion years to the possible origins of DNA which are shrouded in mystery. The book is divided into three parts comprised of 15 chapters and two Brief Interludes. Part I includes subjects underpinning the book such as a primer on DNA, the broader discipline of nanoscience, and experimental tools used by the principals in the narrative. Part II examines the field of structural DNA nanotechnology, founded by biochemist/crystallographer Nadrian Seeman, that uses DNA as a construction material for nanoscale structures and devices, rather than as a genetic material. Part III looks at the work of physicists Noel Clark and Tommaso Bellini who found that short DNA (nanoDNA) forms liquid crystals that act as a structural gatekeeper, orchestrating a series of self-assembly processes using nanoDNA. This led to an explanation of the polymeric structure of DNA and of how life may have emerged from the prebiotic clutter.
Full Product Details
Author: Kenneth Douglas (University of Colorado, Department of Physics, Boulder, USA)
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc
Imprint: CRC Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 17.80cm
, Height: 2.80cm
, Length: 25.40cm
Weight: 0.964kg
ISBN: 9781498750127
ISBN 10: 1498750125
Pages: 456
Publication Date: 15 August 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
`DNA Nanoscience takes us on a journey into the future, where sub-microscopic gadgets built from DNA may be used to detect specific molecules one-at-a-time or to deliver therapeutic drugs specifically to cancer cells. Looking in the other direction, the journey takes us back 4 billion years to a time when the self-organization of DNA into liquid crystals may have facilitated the reproduction of what would become our genetic material, arguably the key step in the origin of life. DNA Nanoscience is scholarly and full of technical figures. But the science is accompanied by clear explanations that make it accessible to college student and science-savvy citizens. It is a pleasure to find a book that is so true to the science while being so enjoyable to read.' - Thomas R. Cech Distinguished Professor, University of Colorado-Boulder; Director, BioFrontiers Institute; Nobel Laureate (Chemistry 1989). `Douglas' DNA Nanoscience is something of a miracle.' - Stuart Kauffman Emeritus Professor Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of Pennsylvania; Affiliate Professor, The Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle; Author of At Home in the Universe. `This book changed my life. Every seven years, as my sabbatical approaches, I search about for a new direction to focus my research and Ken Douglas' book, DNA Nanoscience, appeared just in time.' - Seth Fraden Professor of Physics; Director, The Bioinspired Soft Materials Center, Brandeis University. `Instructive like a textbook and exciting like a novel! For everybody interested in modern natural sciences, this book is a must to read.' - Andreas Herrmann Professor of Polymer Chemistry and Bioengineering; Chair of the Board, The Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials; University of Groningen, The Netherlands. `To sum up, this is both a lively and profound book, the reading of which I strongly recommend.' - Jacques Prost Director Emeritus of CNRS (Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique) at Institut Curie, Paris; Distinguished Professor, National University of Singapore. `This book tells a fascinating new story about DNA. The subject matter also stretches as needed into biology to teach basic ideas about cell membranes and metabolism. It provides a wonderful taste of DNA nanoscience at the research frontier.' - Arjun G. Yodh James M. Skinner Professor of Science, Endowed Chair; Director, PENN Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, University of Pennsylvania. `The only way that the general public will continue to trust the proclamation of the scientific establishment is through books like this one - where the foibles and fears and eccentricities of the scientists are shown to be the same as those of the artist, musician and businessman. Scientists are just artists who want to work with mother nature, without the freedom to make up new worlds as we go along. The real world is magical enough for them.' - Joseph A. Zasadzinski 3M Harry Heltzer Chair in Multidisciplinary Science and Technology; Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota. 'The book's eclectic and elaborate vision, looking back to the ancient past and forward to the equally unknowable future sets Douglas' DNA Nanoscience apart from other attempts to present DNA nanoscience.... Written in beautiful prose and richly illustrated with over 200 full-color figures ... it also serves as a bird's-eye survey for a more general readership, viz., for those in the public who are curious and enjoy thinking. These citizens are aware of DNA nanoscience snippets making it into the daily news but would like to acquire a deeper, more meaningful and thorough understanding of what the fuss is all about. Douglas' book DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology covers an astoundingly broad ground.... By writing this book on the emerging field of DNA nanoscience Kenneth Douglas hasã thus done a double service-to science as well as to its public image. I believe that the reception of the book will do justice to the meticulous research and artistry of this tome.' - Rudolf Podgornik (Jozef Stefan Institute) Journal of Biological Physics (August 2016), DOI: 10.1007/s10867-016-9425-4.
'DNA Nanoscience takes us on a journey into the future, where sub-microscopic gadgets built from DNA may be used to detect specific molecules one-at-a-time or to deliver therapeutic drugs specifically to cancer cells. Looking in the other direction, the journey takes us back 4 billion years to a time when the self-organization of DNA into liquid crystals may have facilitated the reproduction of what would become our genetic material, arguably the key step in the origin of life. DNA Nanoscience is scholarly and full of technical figures. But the science is accompanied by clear explanations that make it accessible to college student and science-savvy citizens. It is a pleasure to find a book that is so true to the science while being so enjoyable to read.' - Thomas R. Cech Distinguished Professor, University of Colorado-Boulder; Director, BioFrontiers Institute; Nobel Laureate (Chemistry 1989). 'Douglas' DNA Nanoscience is something of a miracle.' - Stuart Kauffman Emeritus Professor Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of Pennsylvania; Affiliate Professor, The Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle; Author of At Home in the Universe. 'This book changed my life. Every seven years, as my sabbatical approaches, I search about for a new direction to focus my research and Ken Douglas' book, DNA Nanoscience, appeared just in time.' - Seth Fraden Professor of Physics; Director, The Bioinspired Soft Materials Center, Brandeis University. 'Instructive like a textbook and exciting like a novel! For everybody interested in modern natural sciences, this book is a must to read.' - Andreas Herrmann Professor of Polymer Chemistry and Bioengineering; Chair of the Board, The Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials; University of Groningen, The Netherlands. 'To sum up, this is both a lively and profound book, the reading of which I strongly recommend.' - Jacques Proust Director Emeritus of CNRS (Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique) at Institut Curie, Paris; Distinguished Professor, National University of Singapore. 'This book tells a fascinating new story about DNA. The subject matter also stretches as needed into biology to teach basic ideas about cell membranes and metabolism. It provides a wonderful taste of DNA nanoscience at the research frontier.' - Arjun G. Yodh James M. Skinner Professor of Science, Endowed Chair; Director, PENN Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, University of Pennsylvania. 'The only way that the general public will continue to trust the proclamation of the scientific establishment is through books like this one - where the foibles and fears and eccentricities of the scientists are shown to be the same as those of the artist, musician and businessman. Scientists are just artists who want to work with mother nature, without the freedom to make up new worlds as we go along. The real world is magical enough for them.' - Joseph A. Zasadzinski 3M Harry Heltzer Chair in Multidisciplinary Science and Technology; Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota.
The subjects of Ken Douglas' book may be nanometers in scale, but their stories have Megaimpact. DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology takes us on a journey into the future, where sub-microscopic gadgets built from DNA may be used to detect specific molecules one-at-a-time or to deliver therapeutic drugs specifically to cancer cells. Looking in the other direction, the journey takes us back 4 billion years to a time when the self-organization of DNA into liquid crystals may have facilitated the reproduction of what would become our genetic material, arguably the key step in the origin of life. While so many books on science avoid the personalities involved, Douglas embraces them. Ned Seeman (New York University) is a master at origami, but instead of folding paper into storks, he folds DNA into arrays of shapes reminiscent of those in M.C. Escher prints. His perseverance in the face of technical difficulties is particularly remarkable, considering that for many years the DNA nanostructure field consisted of the Seeman lab alone. The other protagonists are Noel Clark (University of Colorado-Boulder) and Tommaso Bellini (University of Milan). Their chance meeting in Italy led to the discoveries of liquid crystal phases of nanometer-length DNA and of the ability of these phases to select molecules and facilitate their chemical reaction into longer DNA chains. DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology is scholarly and full of technical figures, but the science is accompanied by clear explanations that make it accessible to college students and science-savvy citizens. It is a pleasure to find a book that is so true to the science while being so enjoyable to read. -Thomas R. Cech, Distinguished Professor, University of Colorado-Boulder; Director, BioFrontiers Institute, Nobel Laureate (Chemistry, 1989) Kenneth Douglas's DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology is something of a miracle. With intelligence, care, and even charm, he lays out a crisp account of an emerging field and the origin of life. The emerging field is DNA nanostructures from tiles and brick to nanorobots that can deliver chosen antibodies specifically to cancer cells. He reports new work on the origin of life based on liquid crystals that offers the hope of synthesis of reproducing DNA double-stranded molecules in an entirely unexpected way. If you wish insight into the novel technologies of DNA nanostructures and an expanded view of the origin of life, read this fine book. -Stuart Kauffman, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of Pennsylvania; Affiliate Professor, The Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle; Author of At Home in the Universe This book changed my life. Every seven years, as my sabbatical approaches, I search about for a new direction to focus my research, and Ken Douglas' book, DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology, appeared just in time. Through this book, I read of the work of Hendrik Dietz, whose lab in just a few short years has engineered molecules to pump ions across membranes and is working towards creating molecules that transform chemical energy to perform work inspired by proteins that nature took a billion years to evolve. I became so excited by the prospects of DNA nanotechnology compellingly described in this book, that I arranged to leave Brandeis University and spend 2017 conducting research with Dietz in Munich. This book has three distinct parts, but I feel as if all three sections were written expressly for me, someone who is ignorant of the technical details of the cutting-edge science of DNA nanotechnology but is curious of the history, desirous to be exposed to the outstanding questions, and motivated to learn enough of the requisite knowledge to begin research. On one hand, the book reads like a history of science, replete with entertaining anecdotes of the profound discoveries of the field. On the other hand, the book plays the role of first textbook, with excellent pedagogic written explanations and clear illustrations of the key concepts. The first part of the book provides a reader with a general scientific background sufficient to understand the field of DNA nanotechnology. The second part delves into the details of DNA nanotechnology. It thankfully explains clearly all the background information needed to understand the breakthrough work that took decades of hard labor to elucidate. The third part moves from technology to one of the top three scientifically important questions: what is the origin of life? An astounding tale is told here. It recounts how two liquid crystal scientists, Noel Clark and Tomasso Bellini, turned the story of DNA on its head. Normally, one says that the structure of double-stranded DNA is linear because that is the best way that information can be stored, like a sequence of symbols on an instruction tape of a Turing machine. It turns out that such linear polymers form liquid crystals, which means that at high concentration all the DNA will line up next to each other. This is what allowed Rosalind Franklin to prepare the exquisite X-ray diffraction images of DNA that Watson and Crick deciphered to solve the structure of the double helix. Conventional wisdom holds that DNA forms a liquid crystal because DNA evolved to be a linear chain and that stiff linear chains serendipitously happen to make liquid crystals. Instead, disregarding all convention, Clark and Bellini posit that double-stranded DNA composed of complementary basepairs was created by purely inanimate, cyclic processes over time based on temperature and concentration driven liquid crystalline phase transitions. According to Clark and Bellini, it is the physics of liquid crystallinity that led to DNA, not DNA leading to liquid crystals. As a liquid crystal scientist, thanks to Clark and Bellini, now I can hold my head high with pride, buoyed by the knowledge that liquid crystal scientists are on the verge of explaining the origin of life! As in all great science, what is new and original is provocative. It is too early to tell if Clark and Bellini's bold assertion is true, but this book gives us the tools and motivation to ask the important questions that will lead us all forward. -Seth Fraden, Professor of Physics and Director, The Bioinspired Soft Materials Center, Brandeis University DNA is known for being the medium for storing genetic information. However, in Kenneth Douglas' book, DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology, two emerging topics are treated that put DNA in a very different light. One is the field of DNA nanotechnology that has revolutionized the art and science of fabricating structures on the nanoscale. Moreover, the author describes how these nanoscopic objects have been taught by scientists to act as molecular machines and even how to perform logic operations on cancer cells. On the other hand the book details how short pieces of DNA and RNA form liquid crystals, a completely different type of nanostructure. Contrary to what one might imagine, they do not represent building blocks in future displays but are rather discussed as being early molecular building blocks during the origin of life. The author elegantly connects both topics. These subjects are narrated in a very lively fashion with many personal anecdotes of scientific heroes in the field of DNA nanoscience. This gives the reader an excellent impression of how scientific progress is achieved with all its frustration and successes. Instructive like a textbook and exciting like a novel! For everybody interested in modern natural sciences, this book is a must to read. -Andreas Herrmann, Professor of Polymer Chemistry and Bioengineering; Chair of the Board, The Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen, The Netherlands I have admired Noel Clark's science for more than forty years. I had heard Tommaso Bellini speak at the conference celebrating Noel's 70th birthday and found it very good. I knew of Nadrian Seeman's beautiful work, and I was particularly thrilled by his collaboration with Paul Chaikin and David Pine in which they start to succeed to cook up self-replicating colloidal objects. So when I was asked to write a few words about the book DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology, I accepted immediately, without even starting to read the manuscript. This was pretty unprofessional since, after all, the book could very well have been deceptive. I didn't know Kenneth Douglas! I was lucky: I enjoyed his unique style. The many anecdotes ranging from almost hilarious to really moving give a sense of real life tightly intertwined with real science. Usually it is one or the other. I spent a summer in the subterranean 2B level of the Duane Physical Laboratories of the University of Colorado in Boulder and Douglas' description is just perfect. You get an exact feel of what it's like and of the atmosphere floating there! I trust the other anecdotes are just as faithful and I learned a lot in reading them. But don't be mistaken: this is serious science. All major concepts and techniques are explained in the simplest possible terms keeping enough rigor to be meaningful. Extensive references and exercises are proposed at the end of each chapter. DNA nanoscience and engineering is carefully introduced, with the necessary conceptual tools such as system free energy and topology, allowing us to understand basepairing, the role of sticky ends, the troublesome floppiness, the success of cubic catenanes, and the very clever invention of double crossover molecules. Douglas brings us all the way to nanomachines, 3D crystals and artificial ion channels, a beautiful tour in DNA nanotechnology. Grasping Clark and Bellini's input in the field of prebiotic origins requires a good understanding of liquid crystal physics. Again, concepts involving free energy and entropy are important. Douglas teaches us about the important liquid crystal phases, explaining in the most efficient and simple way the Onsager criterion, and how and why the ordering of short, paired DNA violates its prediction. He subsequently explains how mixtures of pairing and non-pairing nanoDNA can separate respectively into columnar and isotropic phases, and the key role of the subtle depletion interaction in this process. That phase separation between isotropic and liquid crystal phases has played a role in prebiotic conditions is very likely, since it still plays a role in current cell behavior. Then comes the importance of autocatalytic self-ligation. Douglas describes the experiments and the reasoning in a careful and fully convincing way. The columnar structure increases significantly the ligation probability. This explains a missing link: people could understand the appearance of nucleic acid monomers or short oligomers but not longer ones. I buy easily these arguments since I know that radiation-resistant bacteria, which are found in nuclear reactor pools, have their genome organized in a columnar phase in contrast to standard bacteria. Radiation damage does occur, but healing is almost immediate using a process akin to the Clark/Bellini ligation process. Douglas is also very careful to describe alternative ways of thinking, which puts into perspective the originality and power of the Clark/Bellini picture. To sum up, this is both a lively and profound book, the reading of which I strongly recommend. -Jacques Prost, Director Emeritus, CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and founder, Physical Chemistry Laboratory, Institut Curie, Paris; Distinguished Professor, National University of Singapore; Director General Emeritus, ESPCI (Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris); Co-author with P. G. de Gennes of the book The Physics of Liquid Crystals (over 15,000 citations) Ken Douglas' book, DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology, was a very pleasant surprise for me. The book tells a fascinating new story about DNA. Douglas weaves two tales, one tale about how DNA can and will be used in the near future to make nano- and micro-scale objects and devices, and a second tale about how the liquid-crystal physics of DNA was crucial for its chemical evolution billions of years ago. The book is written as a kind of novel for the general public that affectionately describes the personalities of key contributors, along with their struggles and triumphs. However, it also teaches the science with a rigor that will appeal to readers seeking to increase their depth of understanding about these topics. Thus, we not only learn about DNA and state-of-the-art features of DNA nanoscience, but we also learn about liquid crystals and soft materials, about seminal accomplishments in nanotechnology, and about techniques such as X-ray diffraction, electron, optical, and atomic force microscopy that permit visualization of DNA constructs and elements. The subject matter also stretches as needed into biology to teach basic ideas about cell membranes and metabolism. I believe the book will prove interesting for a broad audience ranging from the layperson to students and practitioners in science, engineering, and medicine. It provides a wonderful taste of DNA nanoscience at the research frontier. -Arjun G. Yodh, James M. Skinner Professor of Science, Endowed Chair and Director, PENN Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, University of Pennsylvania 'DNA' is one of those things that is so familiar-millions of people have had their DNA analyzed to determine their origins, heard on the news that an innocent person was released from prison based on DNA evidence, or about the wondrous prospects of personalized medicine made possible by the human genome project and the reduction in cost of having your own genome sequenced. But what is DNA? Douglas answers this question in an accessible, yet technically detailed and accurate way in his new book, DNA Nanoscience: From Prebiotic Origins to Emerging Nanotechnology, by connecting the science to the scientists who made this new genetic revolution possible. The words, nomenclature, and fundamentals of this field need to become as routine to the scientifically curious public as how to design a web page or mastering a cellphone, as a basic understanding of DNA will start to influence our daily lives more and more. As Douglas points out, DNA discovery was a remarkable sequence of triumphs and tragedies, mostly unknown even to modern day scientists. Oswald Avery, Erwin Chargaff, James Watson and Francis Crick, and Frederick Sanger, relative unknowns compared to our modern celebrities, made seminal discoveries about how this remarkable DNA molecule was organized and its ability to convey the information necessary to make a complete bacterium, or with minimal rearrangement, a human being. There is also the tragedy of Rosalind Franklin, who obtained the first high-resolution X-ray diffraction patterns showing the characteristic double helix structure, but died before achieving the recognition she deserved. Douglas takes us on this historical journey to show how DNA performs its almost magical chemistry and physics and why DNA was a necessary ingredient to direct the origin of life. Part of the fascination is that our knowledge of DNA is completely within the lives of our own or our parents' generation! This is not old science or conventional wisdom. Our understanding of DNA came about almost in parallel with that other paradigm of modern life-microelectronics. Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were inventing the transistor about the same time as Avery and Chargaff were discovering the role of DNA in the gene. Crick and Watson were working at the same time as Kilby and Noyce were inventing the integrated circuit that led to microprocessors, the combination of which made sequencing the human genome possible. We are reminded that the people are what make the science so fascinating. In the second part of the book, Douglas again highlights the personalities of the scientists to make sense of the science. Nadrian Seeman is generally recognized as the father of DNA nanotechnology. There is something very human about taking what nature gives us and trying to make it into something else-something that we have decided is 'more useful' or more profitable. Seeman wants to build structures from the bottom up by having them organize themselves by programming a DNA sequence. The day-to-day equivalent would be to have lumber, concrete, wiring, shingles, etc., etc., just show up at a job site by themselves, wait a few days, and have a complete house appear. Douglas takes us through the very basic steps required to change DNA from an information molecule into a combined information-structure molecule according to the rules Seeman has discovered over the past 30 years. While DNA can be quite rigid over short sequences, making corners, connections, and even motors requires an understanding of how the DNA chemistry influences the DNA structure, and how the topology of tangled bits of DNA can lead to complex, three-dimensional objects, a thousandth of the diameter of a strand of hair in size. To do so required the marriage of an ancient art form of origami with the rules imposed by sequencing and folding DNA. The jury is still out on whether or not this new science will find its 'killer app.' It could eventually show why nature decided that DNA and RNA were best suited to information storage and transmission, while structural issues were best left to the lipids and proteins. In the final sections of the book, Douglas tells the newest 'creation' story, starting with liquid crystals-phases in which non-spherical molecules and especially those that are rod or disc-shaped, prefer to line up more or less parallel to each other while staying in a fluid state. Among those that form liquid crystals are long DNA double-helix polymers in solution, which soft matter scientists Noel Clark and Tommaso Bellini took to be a footprint of the origin of DNA in early life. They were surprised to find that even the shortest DNA duplexes could form liquid crystals-DNA's unique end-to-end molecular adhesion apparently can make short DNA act like long DNA and help segregate the molecules into their own special liquid crystalline phase. Concentrating and organizing in this way makes it easier for the DNA to 'ligate' or grow in length and complexity, in turn stabilizing the liquid crystal order, an autocatalytic loop. This is the basic problem of how our original building blocks got together out of the primordial ooze and it is a surprising, yet physically very sound explanation. This liquid crystal hypothesis explains rather nicely how DNA became DNA out of a sloppy mixture of molecularly rather simple building blocks. We still need to figure out how the DNA managed to start coding for proteins and lipids and all of the other things that make up living creatures. But this is a fun start. In sum, Douglas does an excellent job of capturing the reader's interest in one of the fundamental chapters of science that the current and future generations need to understand. This book can shorten the distance between the scientist and non-scientist by making the science personal, fun, and somewhat intuitive, except where the findings are so counter-intuitive. The only way that the general public will continue to trust the proclamations of the scientific establishment is through books like this one-where the foibles and fears and eccentricities of the scientists are shown to be the same as those of the artist, musician, and businessman. Scientists are just artists who want to work with mother nature, without the freedom to make up new worlds as we go along. The real world is magical enough for them. -Joseph A. Zasadzinski, 3M Harry Heltzer Chair in Multidisciplinary Science and Technology Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota
Author Information
Kenneth Douglas is a member of the Research Faculty in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He received his B.A. (mathematics) and M.S. (physics) at the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. (physics) at the University of Colorado-Boulder. His area of specialization is biomimetic nanofabrication. He devised a strategy that employs the surface layers of bacterial extremophiles — e.g., Sulfolobus acidocaldarius — as masks to fabricate nanoscale periodic patterns on inorganic substrates. He is co-inventor of the first-ever U.S. patents for parallel fabrication of nanoscale multi-device structures. His work has appeared in Science, Nature, Biophysical Journal, Applied Physics Letters, Physical Review B, Surface Science, FEMS Microbiology Reviews, Journal of Applied Physics, Popular Science and elsewhere. Douglas has authored multiple book chapters and seven U.S. patents.
