Hardening DNA-Built Nanoparticle Lattices with Silica: The 2021 Resilience Paper Behind the Later Strength Claims (Majewski et al.)

Before the silica nanolattice strength results associated with Oleg Gang and colleagues, a 2021 paper took up a more basic question: can a nanoparticle crystal organised by DNA be made to survive harsh conditions? The paper, "Resilient three-dimensional ordered architectures assembled from nanoparticles by DNA", appeared in Science Advances (volume 7, issue 12, article eabf0617), and its US Department of Energy record is OSTI ID 1771846. A one-line summary on the DOE page states the headline: "Resilient silica-nanoparticle lattices organized by DNA withstand harsh temperature, pressure and radiation conditions."

Who did the work and who paid for it

The record lists seven authors: Pawel W. Majewski, Aaron Michelson, Marco A. L. Cordeiro, Wenyan Liu, Eric A. Stach, Kevin G. Yager and Oleg Gang. The listed affiliations are the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of Warsaw's Department of Chemistry, two departments at Columbia University (Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, and Chemical Engineering), and the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The record does not say which author belongs to which institution. Brookhaven is named as the research organisation, under report number BNL-221343-2021-JAAM. The sponsors are the US Army Research Office and the Department of Energy's Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under contract numbers SC0008772 and SC0012704.

What is claimed

The claim, as the record states it, has three parts. First, nanoparticles are organised into ordered three-dimensional lattices by DNA. Second, the lattices involve silica. Third, the resulting structures withstand harsh temperature, pressure and radiation. The word "resilient" in the title refers to this survival under extreme conditions, not to a measured strength. The record gives no temperatures, pressures or radiation doses, no description of the silica chemistry and no statement of how survival was judged, for example whether the lattice order was kept or the material merely stayed intact. The record itself does not establish any of these details.

What the reference list hints at

The record includes the paper's 68 references. They hint at the topics the paper engages with, but they are not results, and the record does not say what experiments were done.

• Why DNA lattices need protection. Several citations concern keeping DNA structures intact, among them a 2017 paper on an oligolysine coating that protects DNA nanostructures from "low-salt denaturation and nuclease degradation" and a 2017 paper on block copolymer micelles as a protection strategy for DNA origami. Their presence suggests that the fragility of DNA-based structures is part of the paper's motivation, though the record does not say so directly.
• DNA-guided assembly. The paper cites the 1996 Nature papers by Mirkin and by Alivisatos on assembling nanoparticles with DNA, and the 2008 Nature papers on DNA-programmable and DNA-guided nanoparticle crystallisation, including one by Nykypanchuk and colleagues. Among related lattice work it cites Tian, Ye et al. (Nature Materials, 2016), "Lattice engineering through nanoparticle–DNA frameworks"; Liu, W., Tagawa, Xin and colleagues (Science, 2016), "Diamond family of nanoparticle superlattices"; and Tian, Ye et al. (Nature Materials, 2020) on "DNA-prescribed and valence-controlled material voxels." That last title closely matches the patent US12548243B2 — 3D-Organized Nanomaterials Through DNA-Prescribed and Valence-Controlled Material. All of these predate the 2021 paper.
• Silica grown on DNA. The sol-gel references include Numata et al. (2004), an early attempt to transfer DNA structure into inorganic material, as well as Liu et al. (2018) and Nguyen, Döblinger and Liedl (2019) on silica grown over DNA origami. Brinker's 1988 paper on silicate hydrolysis and condensation is also cited. This is the chemistry described in DNA Origami Templating.
• Pressure. The paper cites a 1986 paper titled "Calibration of the ruby pressure gauge to 800 kbar under quasi-hydrostatic conditions" and work on how nanocrystal supercrystals behave under high pressure. It also cites a study of transitions between amorphous forms of silica glass and a 2013 paper titled "Super-compressible DNA nanoparticle lattices." These point to pressure as a topic of the paper; the record does not describe any pressure experiment or result.
• Radiation. Three cited papers concern radiation damage or radiation tolerance in nanomaterials: Beyerlein et al. (2013), "Radiation damage tolerant nanomaterials"; Zhang et al. (2018), "Radiation damage in nanostructured materials"; and Bringa et al., "Are Nanoporous Materials Radiation Resistant?" A fourth, Nambiar and Yeow (2012), is titled "Polymer-Composite Materials for Radiation Protection."
• Mechanics and other topics. Citations of a 2019 article titled "3D metamaterials" and a study of size effects in nanoporous gold connect the reference list to Mechanical Metamaterials. The list also includes papers on nanomanufacturing, neuromorphic computing and superconducting qubits; the record does not say why they are cited.

What this record does and does not establish

The OSTI record confirms the paper's bibliographic facts: title, authors, journal, funders and report number. A summary line on the DOE page says the silica-nanoparticle lattices withstand harsh temperature, pressure and radiation conditions; the record does not say who wrote that line. It does not show how harsh those conditions were or how much of the original order survived, and it contains no mechanical strength figures. Readers should treat "resilient" here as a summary claim whose supporting details the record does not establish.

Place in the dossier

The paper sits between earlier DNA-programmed assembly work and the later nanolattice results. The Cell Reports Physical Science paper "High-strength, lightweight nano-architected silica", led by Michelson, measured yield strength by In Situ Micro-Compression Testing (see Silica Nanolattice). The 2024 Michelson et al. paper went further and coated the silica with metals and oxides (Beyond Silica: Coating DNA-Built Nanolattices with Metals, Oxides and Semiconductors by Liquid and Vapour Infiltration (Michelson et al., 2024)). This 2021 paper is an earlier step concerned with survival under harsh conditions rather than strength. It should not be read as evidence for the claim, discussed in DNA-Silica Claims vs. Evidence: The Press Multiplier, the Paper Abstract and the Patent List, that the silica nanolattices have yield strengths higher than any known engineering material of similar mass density. Survival under extreme conditions and density-normalised strength are separate properties, addressed in separate studies.