While much work has been devoted to
nanoscale assembly of functional materials, selective
reversible assembly of components in the nanoscale
pattern at selective sites has received much less attention.
Exerting such a reversible control of the assembly process
will make it possible to fine-tune the functional properties
of the assembly and to realize more complex designs.
Herein, by taking advantage of different binding affinities
of biotin and desthiobiotin toward streptavidin, we
demonstrate selective and reversible decoration of DNA
origami tiles with streptavidin, including revealing an
encrypted Morse code “NANO” and reversible exchange
of uppercase letter “I” with lowercase “i”. The yields of the
conjugations are high (>90%), and the process is
reversible. We expect this versatile conjugation technique
to be widely applicable with different nanomaterials and
templates