Another virtue of my experiments is that I use the same long single strand over and over again (the natural virus sequence) and I just change the ∼200 short staple strands. This means I don't have to do a custom long synthesis every time I want to make a new structure.

311

Even by the time I was making smiley faces, I didn't really believe that the method worked as well as it did.

166

We take that very long strand of DNA -- it's about 7,000 letters long -- and we add to it about 200 short DNA strands that I call staples.

161

We actually fold the DNA into any shape that we want. So in the case of the smiley faces that I made, I actually fold the DNA into a disk, but then leave two holes for the eyes and the mouth.

128