Read the full article here: Adv. Mater. 2002332 (2020). by Guo, J., Haehnle, B.,Hoenders, D., Creusen, G. Jiao, D., Kuehne, A. J. K., Walther A. The tran sition toward future sustainable societies largely depends on disruptive innovations in biobased materials to substitute nonsustainable advanced functional materials. In the field of optics, advanced devices (e.g., lasers or metamaterial devices) are typically manufactured using top‐down engineering and synthetic materials. This work breaks with such concepts and switchable lasers self‐assembled from plant‐based cellulose nanocrystals and fluorescent polymers at room temperature and from water are shown. Controlled structure formation allow

Read the full article here: Nat. Nanotechnol.1856 (2020). by Samanta, A., Sabatino, V., Ward, T., Walther, A., For life to emerge, the confinement of catalytic reactions within protocellular environments has been proposed to be a decisive aspect to regulate chemical activity in space1. Today, cells and organisms adapt to signals2,3,4,5,6 by processing them through reaction networks that ultimately provide downstream functional responses and structural morphogenesis7,8. Re-enacting such signal processing in de novo-designed protocells is a profound challenge, but of high importance for understanding the design of adaptive systems with life-like traits. We report on engineered all-DNA protocel

Read the full article here: J. Am. Chem. Soc. DOI:10.1021/jacs.0c05488 (2020). by Creusen, G., Oluwadunsin Akintayo, C., Schumann, K., Walther, A. Solid-phase oligonucleotide synthesis (SPOS) based on phosphoramidite chemistry is currently the most widespread technique for DNA and RNA synthesis but suffers from scalability limitations and high reagent consumption. Liquid-phase oligonucleotide synthesis (LPOS) uses soluble polymer supports and has the potential of being scalable. However, at present, LPOS requires 3 separate reaction steps and 4–5 precipitation steps per nucleotide addition. Moreover, long acid exposure times during the deprotection step degrade sequences with high A content

Read the full article here: Nat. Commun.11, 3658 (2020). by Jie, D., Walther, A. Biological systems organize multiple hierarchical structures in parallel, and create dynamic assemblies and functions by energy dissipation. In contrast, emerging artificial non-equilibrium self-assembling systems have remained relatively simplistic concerning hierarchical design, and non-equilibrium multi-component systems are uncharted territory. Here we report a modular DNA toolbox allowing to program transient non-equilibrium multicomponent systems across hierarchical length scales by introducing chemically fueled molecular recognition orchestrated by reaction networks of concurrent ATP-powered ligation and

Read the full article here: Nanoscale, 12, 16995 (2020). by Groeer, S., Walther, A. 3D DNA origami provide access to the de novo design of monodisperse and functional bio(organic) nanoparticles, and complement structural protein engineering and inorganic and organic nanoparticle synthesis approaches for the design of self-assembling colloidal systems. We show small 3D DNA origami nanoparticles, which polymerize and depolymerize reversibly to nanotubes of micrometer lengths by applying fuel/antifuel switches. 3D DNA nanocylinders are engineered as a basic building block with different numbers of overhang strands at the open sides to allow for their assembly via fuel strands that bridge both o

Read the full article here: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 59, DOI:10.1002/anie.202006526 (2020). by Sun, M., Jie, D,. Walther, A. Adaptivity is an essential trait of life. One type of adaptivity is the reconfiguration of a functional system states by correlating sensory inputs. We report polymer transformers, which can adaptively reconfigure their composition from a state of a mixed copolymer to being enriched in either monomer A or B. This is achieved by embedding and hierarchically interconnecting two chemically fueled activation/deactivation enzymatic reaction networks for both monomers via a joint activation pathway (network level) and an AB linker monomer reactive to both A and B (species level

Read the full article here: Macromol. Rapid Commun. 2000191 (2020). by Gehlen, D. B., Jürgens, N., Omidinia‐Anarkoli, A., Haraszti, T., George, J., Walther, A., Ye, H., De Laporte, L. The replacement of diseased and damaged organs remains an challenge in modern medicine. However, through the use of tissue engineering techniques, it may soon be possible to (re)generate tissues and organs using artificial scaffolds. For example, hydrogel networks made from hydrophilic precursor solutions can replicate many properties found in the natural extracellular matrix (ECM) but often lack the dynamic nature of the ECM, as many covalently crosslinked hydrogels possess elastic and static networks with nan

Read the full article here: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 59, 1 (2020). by Lückerath, T., Koynov,K., Loescher, S., Whitfield, C. J., Nuhn, L., Walther, A., Barner-Kowollik, C., Ng, D., Weil, T. Nanostructures derived from amphiphilic DNA–polymer conjugates have emerged prominently due to their rich self‐assembly behavior; however, their synthesis is traditionally challenging. Here, we report a novel platform technology towards DNA–polymer nanostructures of various shapes by leveraging polymerization‐induced self‐assembly (PISA) for polymerization from single‐stranded DNA (ssDNA). A “grafting from” protocol for thermal RAFT polymerization from ssDNA under ambient conditions was developed and utilized

Read the full article here: Polymers, 12, 1522 (2020) Recent advances in nanocellulose technology have revealed the potential of crystalline cellulose nanofibers to reinforce materials which are useful for tissue engineering, among other functions. However, the low biodegradability of nanocellulose can possess some problems in biomedical applications. In this work, alginate particles with encapsulated enzyme cellulase extracted fromTrichoderma reeseiwere prepared for the biodegradation of crystalline cellulose nanofibers, which carrier system could be incorporated in tissue engineering biomaterials to degrade the crystalline cellulose nanoreinforcement in situ and on-demand during tissue reg