The domains of DNA and RNA nanotechnology are steadily gaining in popularity while proving their value with various successful results, including biosensing robots and drug delivery cages. Nowadays, the nanotechnology design pipeline usually relies on computer-based design (CAD) approaches to design and simulate the desired structure before the wet lab assembly. To aid with these tasks, various software tools exist and are often used in conjunction. However, their interoperability is hindered by a lack of a common file format that is fully descriptive of the many design paradigms. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Unified Nanotechnology Format (UNF) designed specifically for the biomimetic nanotechnology field. UNF allows storage of both design and simulation data in a single file, including free-form and lattice-based DNA structures. By defining a logical and versatile format, we hope it will become a widely accepted and used file format for the nucleic acid nanotechnology community, facilitating the future work of researchers and software developers. Together with the format description and publicly available documentation, we provide a set of converters from existing file formats to simplify the transition. Finally, we present several use cases visualizing example structures stored in UNF, showcasing the various types of data UNF can handle.

Business Unit Molecular Diagnostics AIT Austrian Institute of Technology 1210 Vienna Austria

Center for Applied Scientific Computing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore CA 94550 USA

Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics The Biodesign Institute School of Molecular Sciences Arizona State University Tempe AZ 85281 USA

Visualization Laboratory Faculty of Informatics Masaryk University 60200 Brno Czech Republic

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CATANA: an online modelling environment for proteins and nucleic acid nanostructures