July 2022

DNA origami blocks

by Shawn Douglas, Bret Victor, Luke Iannini

Handmade papercraft blocks that represent a section of DNA origami, and show a correctly-rendered view on all six faces.

Internal magnets make the blocks snap together at architecturally-valid positions.

They can be of any size, but for the structure in Biomolecular design in Realtalk, we only needed two different sizes.

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Part of DNA Origami Kit (2022).

Later: Papercraft (2023)

Making of.

4:39

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3:26

0:55

Nanodot box prototype

Not nearly as nice as Shawn’s as mine was cut with hand scissors and made of thin...

I've been using Luke's new Scene kit to render 3D models of DNA origami from...

I think this magnet pattern works. This is a single species of block that can be...

The dot code can either be: - aligned with the magnets (and presumably,...

I guess each block also has another magnet on each end, but those are easy....

Great! I’ll try implementing this tomorrow as soon as I update the rendering style...

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