Delivering therapeutic drug molecules or genes to cells requires nanoscale carriers that can interact with proteins inside the cell and navigate to the nucleus, if needed. Nanoparticles made entirely out of synthetic deoxyribonucleic acid strands have proven useful in building such delivery systems. Although they work well for drug delivery, their behavior inside the cell is not fully understood, which presents challenges to improving nanoparticles for specific applications. This project will encode synthetic deoxyribonucleic acid nanoparticles with gene sequences and measure the extent to which these nanoparticles interact with the cell’s protein building machinery to make a protein of choice. Various bioengineering and fluorescence tools will be used to study the nanoparticles in living cells. Effects of shape, design, and other features of the nanoparticles on their behavior and function as gene delivery systems will be determined. The team will engage local high school students in research for 10-week long programs at Case Western Reserve University. The project will also support educational module design using mixed reality technology to teach topics in bioconjugate chemistry. Nanoparticles created from self-assembly of synthetic deoxyribonucleic acids (referred to as DNA origami nanoparticles) are being developed for targeted delivery of drugs, bioimaging probes, and functional nucleic acids. However, the stability of these nanoparticles and how they interface wit