small: A Programmatic Nanostructure Design and Modelling Environment

TL;DR

small is a versatile software environment that integrates various tools for designing, simulating, and visualizing complex DNA nanostructures and hybrid nanomaterials, streamlining nanotechnology workflows.

Contribution

This paper introduces small, a novel programmatic platform that unifies multiple DNA and non-DNA nanotechnology tools for hierarchical design and modeling.

Findings

Enabled integrated design and simulation of DNA nanostructures

Demonstrated modeling of hybrid DNA-nanoparticle materials

Facilitated visualization of nanostructure properties

Abstract

Structural DNA nanotechnology has advanced to the extent that extremely complex structures can be designed. Much of this advancement has been due to the development of automated DNA design and simulation tools. Typically, the tools (e.g. NUPAK, cadnano, OxDNA) are created for a specific task. Ideally, there would be an environment that can integrate all such DNA tools, also with non-DNA tools - for example for modelling electromagnetic field along a zero-mode waveguide made of gold nanoparticles organized on a DNA breadboard. Such an environment would streamline design in DNA nanotechnology and enable applying DNA nanotechnology principles to construct high performance materials and devices from non-DNA components. Here we present small a programmatic tool that is a step towards building such an environment for designing arbitrary nanostructures. In particular we showcase how small has been used to create an integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) framework for DNA nanotechnology, allowing the hierarchical design, simulation and visualization of arbitrary DNA nanostructures. Furthermore we demonstrate the design and modeling of the mode profiles and band structure of hybrid DNA-nanoparticle materials through the integration of small with Maxwell solvers.