Cooperativity in the annealing of DNA origamis

Abstract: DNA based nanostructures built on a long single stranded DNA scaffold, known as DNA origamis, offer the possibility to organize various molecules at the nanometer scale in one pot experiments. The folding of the scaffold is guaranteed by the presence of short, single stranded DNA sequences (staples), that hold together separate regions of the scaffold. In this paper, we modelize the annealing-melting properties of these DNA constructions. The model captures important features such as the hysteresis between melting and annealing, as well as the dependence upon the topology of the scaffold. We show that cooperativity between staples is critical to quantitatively explain the folding process of DNA origamis.