ABSTRACT
For over half a century, the biological roles of nucleic acids as catalytic enzymes, intracellular regulatory molecules, and the carriers of genetic information have been studied extensively. More recently, the sequence-specific binding properties of DNA have been exploited to direct the assembly of materials at the nanoscale. This chapter draws an analogy between such building blocks and the familiar chemical concepts of “bonds” and “valency” and review two distinct but related strategies that have used this design principle in constructing new configurations of matter. Synthetic chemists regularly wield this degree of control over atoms by manipulating the formation of covalent bonds, and supramolecular chemists control the organization of larger molecular species through the manipulation of noncovalent interactions. The synthesis of nanomaterials and their assembly into larger well-defined architectures has conceptually similar goals.
