Design of Mao Tensegrity Triangles -- Successful Prediction of Stable DNA Nanostructures.

One of the most promising motifs for crystal formation is the tensegrity triangle first developed by Mao and co-workers. This structure consists of three duplex domains ``woven'' across each other. Because the three edges of the triangle are not coplanar, it can serve as a fundamentally three-dimensional motif. This nonplanarity, however, makes the design of tensegrity triangles more complicated than most of the other DNA motifs built to date. We present a geometry-based method for estimating the strain associated with various tensegrity triangle edge lengths. Experiments confirm that the predicted low-strain structures form stably, while structures with strain larger than about 5{\%} tend to form multimers easily.