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Introduction The ability to mold materials into arbitrary micro- and nanostructures is one of the foundational technologies of our society. The different approaches to this problem can be broadly classified as either “top-down” or “bottom-up,” although some emerging techniques combine aspects of both categories. Top-down lithography has been the primary force behind the phenomenal success of the electronics industry. Within industry, optical or electron-beam lithography is used to pattern polymer resist, after which the resulting patterns are transferred into an underlying substrate by etching or material growth. It is currently possible to fabricate millions of identical semiconductor chips with billions of transistors with feature sizes as small as 7 nm.1 Today, these techniques are also being used to fabricate micromechanical and optical devices, as well as microfluidic chips to study biochemical interactions. Despite these strengths, the top-down approach is not without its shortcomings. It demands high capital and operational costs, is primarily applicable to planar surfaces, and suffers heavily from material

incompatibilities. In contrast, bottom-up approaches such as soft lithography,2 colloidal,3 and nucleic acid self-assembly4 are inexpensive, have wide material compatibility, and offer more favorable scalability. Among bottom-up nanofabrication techniques, scaffolded DNA origami5 is particularly attractive due to the ease with which its shape can be programmed in two and three dimensions, its high yield, geometric homogeneity, and the possibility of biosynthesizing all of its building blocks.6 Additionally, since every part of a DNA origami is uniquely identifiable with a particular DNA sequence, it is possible to use the origami as a scaffold to organize functional nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes, quantum dots, or proteins at a spatial resolution of ∼5 nm. This last ability is especially important within the larger context of structural DNA nanotechnology, which has built a large catalog of methods that enable DNA to be attached to almost any nanomaterial.4 Thus, we argue that no other nanofabrication technique, top-down or bottom-up, offers the homogeneity, ease of design, cost benefit, modularity, and material compatibility offered by DNA origami.

Anqin Xu, Department of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh, USA; [email protected] John N. Harb, Department of Engineering and Technology, Brigham Young University, USA; [email protected] Mauri A. Kostiainen, School of Chemical Engineering, Aalto University, Finland; [email protected] William L. Hughes, Boise State University, USA; [email protected] Adam T. Woolley, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Brigham Young University, USA; [email protected] Haitao Liu, Department of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh, USA; [email protected] Ashwin Gopinath, Department of Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology, USA; [email protected] doi:10.1557/mrs.2017.275

• VOLUME • DECEMBER © 2017 Materials Research Society MRS 2017 • www.mrs.org/b