DNA-origami barrels

DNA origami, in which a long scaffold strand is assembled with a large number of short staple strands into parallel arrays of double helices, has proven a powerful method for custom nanofabrication. Although diverse shapes in 2D are possible, the single-layer rectangle has proven the most popular, as it features fast and robust folding and modular design of staple strands for simple abstraction to a regular pixel surface. Here we introduce a barrel architecture, built as stacked rings of double helices, that retains these appealing features, while extending construction into 3D. We demonstrate hierarchical assembly of a 100 megadalton barrel that is ~90 nm in diameter and ~270 nm in height, and that provides a rhombic-lattice canvas of a thousand pixels each, with a pitch of 9 nm, on its inner and outer surfaces. Complex patterns rendered on these surfaces were resolved using up to twelve rounds of exchange PAINT super-resolution fluorescence microscopy. We envision these structures as versatile nanoscale pegboards for applications requiring complex 3D arrangements of matter.