Towards in vivo origami: co-transcriptional folding of a bio-orthogonal scaffolded RNA nanoribbon

Different self-assembly strategies have been adopted to design and synthesize RNA nanostructures, ranging from RNA architectonics to single-stranded self-assembly. Nonetheless, the scaffolded RNA origami approach is still in its infancy. Motivated by our previous studies, and with the ultimate goal of enabling RNA origami expression in living cells, e.g. to control metabolic pathways or a cell's rheology, we demonstrated a full isothermal protocol for multi-strand scaffolded RNA origami assembly via co-transcriptional folding at 37°C.

In this talk, I will show and describe our main results, from the use of biologically afunctional De Bruijn sequences as scaffold, to the in vitro transcription of DNA templates to be folded into a nanoribbon shaped origami in a one-pot reaction. Finally, I'll discuss next steps towards the in vivo origami expression.