DNA and RNA articles from across Nature Portfolio

Membrane budding plays pivotal roles in cellular processes, but a fully artificial system mimicking natural budding processes remains elusive. Here, the authors report a DNA origami-based membrane budding system that recapitulates key aspects of clathrin-mediated endocytosis without relying on components of cellular budding machineries.

Lipid nanoparticles are the gold standard for mRNA delivery but suffer from low loading capacity. Here, the authors report on the use of manganese ions to form mRNA rich cores within lipid nanoparticles which increased mRNA loading, reducing the lipid needed and increasing transfection and immune response in vivo.

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are a versatile class of clinically approved drug delivery vehicles, particularly for nucleic acid cargoes, but they often suffer from instability issues. Here, the authors report that the room temperature stability of small interfering RNA LNPs formulated with unsaturated ionizable lipids can be improved by inclusion of mildly acidic, antioxidant-containing buffers.

Locked nucleic acids have high binding and utility but currently suffer from off target effects due to the high does needed. Here, the authors show lipid nanoparticles can safely and effectively deliver locked nucleic acids to inflamed tissue in the gut, reducing the required dose and improving therapeutic outcomes in IBD.

Dendrimers are precisely structured macromolecules with unique architectural symmetry and multivalency, offering a promising solution to the delivery challenges of nucleic acid therapeutics. Here, we explore recent advances in dendrimer design that enable targeted delivery to hard-to-transfect cells and difficult-to-reach tissues.

Protein materials are promising drug delivery vehicles, but their use for intracellular protein and nucleic acid cargo delivery has been limited. We have developed self-assembling elastin-like polypeptide (ELP)-based protein nanoparticles that are functionalized to enable complexation and intracellular delivery of biomacromolecular cargo, including gene editors in the form of mRNA, plasmid DNA and ribonucleoproteins.

DNA delivery using lipid nanoparticles results in severe toxicity in mice. However, we find that the incorporation of endogenous anti-inflammatory lipids into the lipid nanoparticles mitigates this toxicity and enables prolonged gene expression.

In vitro-transcribed RNA is a promising emerging class of therapeutic, but the poor specificity of cargo RNAs so far has limited their application in cancer immunotherapy. A new study reports the delivery of a synthetic circular RNA with inline cis-acting translational elements — encoding an engineered, mitochondrion-specific oncolytic protein — that shows both therapeutic and prophylactic potential against adenocarcinoma.

We designed a method for fast aptamer selection by integrating biomaterials science, engineering principles and biology. Aptamer candidates dynamically interacting with immobilized targets in a three-dimensional, non-fouling and macroporous polyethylene glycol hydrogel were rapidly enriched and selected with high affinity against five protein targets.