DNA origami: unfolding genetic breakthroughs
Johnson and Alistar competed as finalists in CU Boulder’s 2025 Lab Venture Challenge where their technology generated much interest from industry leaders.
Access to DNA is crucial in many branches of biomedical research. But making long strands of DNA is time consuming, error-prone and expensive.
Over the years, researchers have worked to make DNA synthesis more efficient, with important contributions made by Marvin Caruthers, distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. This research has advanced a range of biomedical fields including drug and vaccine development, pathogen tests, and cancer diagnostics.
Making DNA involves complex biochemical and mechanical processes to assemble a strand base by base. At each stage, there is a small chance of failure, but in doing this process over and over for more bases, that chance increases.
The process of creating a DNA strand longer than 1,000 bases often takes several weeks, which can hinder research cycles. To solve this, biotech companies have pursued incremental efficiency gains in strand construction.
Now researchers in the ATLAS Institute’s Living Matter Lab aim to rethink DNA synthesis altogether.
A new way to build DNA
Lab director and assistant professor Mirela Alistar and post-doctoral researcher Joshua Johnson are working to develop nanorobots that will more quickly and accurately build DNA to meet researchers’ specifications in a matter of days instead of weeks.
They are employing DNA origami—a creative technique for shaping these building blocks of life—to create a nanorobot to speed the process of making new DNA strands. “It folds much like paper origami, but it is made of DNA,” Johnson noted. “Our particular nanorobot is rectangular with a rotating arm element. It is about 2,000 times smaller than the width of human hair.”
DNA origami research dates back to 2006, with scientists making simple but precise nanoscale shapes and patterns. Alistar and Johnson aim to apply this technique to the mechanical arrangement of molecules. “We are taking existing scientific concepts and combining them in new ways—much like engineering a normal sized robot but at the molecular scale," Johnson elaborated.
Alistar explained the team’s contribution to DNA origami research as “designing the DNA structure that becomes a robot such that it is more stable, translating the fabrication process from extremely highly advanced labs to a little bit of a lower-key lab in computer science, which means we have to be inventive with a lot of the processes.”
The right place for the research
The ATLAS Institute’s relationships with the College of Engineering and Applied Science create space for such breakthrough research. “We are interdisciplinary—I'm confident saying that,” Alistar said. “We do work with DNA for bacteriophages. We also work with microfluidics, which is also needed for the DNA nanorobot. So there are a lot of intersections in which we saw the potential for developing a DNA origami-based project in the lab.”
Sensing great promise in their research, the team is seeking a commercialization path to reach the real-world. “This nanomachine process that we developed could be substantially faster than anything else in the industry,” Johnson noted. “There is a clear market need: biotech and pharmaceutical companies wait weeks for their large DNA strands, and that slows down research.”
According to early market analysis, these companies would be willing to pay more to get their DNA faster. “We've identified that the gene synthesis market would benefit most because they need the longest DNA, they need it the fastest and they're willing to pay the most for it,” Johnson said.
Alistar also noted potential in cell-free research. “A lot of development in biology goes toward using merely DNA, not living cells. Applications are mostly in vaccines.” If, for example, you could more quickly make a vaccine even in remote places, that could have major implications for global health.
To commercialize this research, Alistar and Johnson are pursuing “a lot of support from CU Boulder and the state of Colorado in getting to an actual product,” Alistar explained. “If everything goes right, we're gonna be enrolled in a national-level program for two months of customer discovery research.”
The team hopes to demonstrate market feasibility of their new synthesis method within three years to improve one of the main bottlenecks in biotech research and help smooth the way toward improved vaccines, gene therapy and more personalized medicine.
