Gereon Andreas Brüggenthies

1 Introduction DNA nanotechnology and, in particular, the DNA origami technique have advanced rapidly in the last decades and have reached an unprecedent level of complexity and functionality at the nanoscale.[1] While the easy design of DNA origami and the spatial control of chemical modifications with base pair precision have opened up a plethora of potential applications in different fields, such as, plasmonics, biosensing, drug delivery, or nanorobotics, the intrinsic instability toward...

1 Introduction Life with all of its complex functions is based on the capacity of matter to self-organize. On the molecular level, proteins have the capability to spontaneously self-assemble into functional complexes. On larger scales, such as cells and organisms, self-assembly processes become less reliable, as a result of the inherent stochasticity of the self-assembling units and, in particular, the inefficiency of diffusion in targeting them to the sites of assembly.