Life teems with interactions. Proteins bind. Bonds form between atoms, and break. Enzymes cut. Drugs attach to cell receptors. DNA hybridizes. Those interactions make the processes of life work, and capturing them has led to many medical advances.

“Determining which molecules interact, and measuring the strength of these interactions is fundamental for many areas of research, from drug discovery to understanding the mechanisms underlying disease,” says Wesley P. Wong, PhD, a biophysicist with Boston Children’s Hospital’s Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine (PCMM), Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

Technologies abound for studying molecular-level interactions quantitatively. But most are complex and expensive, requiring dedicated instruments and specific training on how to prep samples and run the experiments.

Wong and his team, including graduate student Mounir Koussa and postdoctoral fellows Ken Halvorsen, PhD (now at the RNA Institute) and Andrew Ward, PhD, have created an alternative method that democratizes the process. Using electrophoresis gels, found in just about any biomedical laboratory, they’ve developed what they call DNA nanoswitches. These switches let researchers make interaction measurements without complex instruments, at a cost of pennies per sample. …