Strategies for the Site-Specific Decoration of DNA Origami Nanostructures with Functionally Intact Proteins
Joschka Hellmeier, René Platzer, Vanessa Mühlgrabner, Magdalena C. Schneider, Elke Kurz, Gerhard J. Schütz, Johannes B. Huppa, Eva Sevcsik
Abstract
covalent DNA conjugation, resulted in a 3-fold decrease in ligand potency, likely due to charge-mediated impairment of protein function. Replacing DNA with charge-neutral peptide nucleic acid (PNA) in a ligand conjugate emerged as the coupling strategy with the best overall performance in our study, as it produced the highest yield with no multivalent DNA origami structures and fully retained protein functionality. With our study we aim to provide guidelines for the stoichiometrically defined, site-specific functionalization of DNA origami structures with proteins of choice serving a wide range of biological applications.