Synthetic biologists and nanobiologists are re-purposing DNA, the hereditary material present in nearly all the body’s cells, as a smart and stable self-assembling material to build nanofactories, drug-delivering nanostructures and molecular devices that can sense their environment and respond in different ways by, for example, detecting inflammation in the body or toxins in the environment. These nanoscale applications often involve the synthesis of large sequences comprising thousands of the building blocks that DNA is made of, known as the A, T, C and G nucleotide bases, which can be further folded and structured due to the specific base-pairing abilities between As and Ts, and Cs and Gs, respectively.