Fig. 5: Comparing unregulated DNA nanotube growth with buffer-regulated growth.

a Fluorescence micrographs of DNA nanotubes after different durations of unregulated or buffer-regulated growth. Scale bars: 10 µm. b Mean lengths of seeded nanotubes during unregulated (left) or buffer-regulated growth (right) (Methods, Supplementary Fig. 18). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals from bootstrapping. c Distributions of seeded nanotube lengths after 48 h from the experiments presented in a. For distributions of nanotube lengths at other timepoints, see Supplementary Fig. 19. d Fractions of viable seeds with nanotubes after 72 h of growth. Experimental variation (possibly due to pipetting) and sampling errors introduced slight variations in the fractions of viable seeds with nanotubes across timepoints; at most timepoints regulated growth resulted in a fraction near 1. The fractions for all timepoints are shown in Supplementary Fig. 10. Error bars on proportions represent 95% confidence intervals. e Mean concentrations of M_S incorporated into nanotubes during growth. This value is roughly 35–40 nM for unregulated growth at all seed concentrations. Error bars represent standard deviation across images. Regulated growth experiments were conducted with [I_i]_o = [P_i]_o = 5.5 µM and [C_i]_o = 1.25 µM for both monomer types. The sample sizes for every timepoint of each sample are tabulated in Supplementary Note 14.