In California, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute showed that they could make several potentially valuable chemical modifications to DNA nucleotides and produce useful quantities of the modified DNA. The chemists demonstrated their new approach by making a DNA-based, water-absorbing hydrogel that ultimately may have multiple medical and scientific uses.
They also created a new DNA-based hydrogel that turned out to have some intriguing properties. Scientists found that they could dissolve it with DNA-cutting enzymes and later reform it in any desired mold using DNA-joining enzymes, allowing them to form and reform the hydrogel with new stable structures. Test proteins placed within the hydrogel also retained their biochemical activity. “We think this hydrogel can have applications ranging from novel forms of drug delivery to the growing of cells in three-dimensional cultures,” said Tingjian Chen, one of the two lead researchers on the project.