Nucleic acid design is the process of generating a set of
nucleic acid base sequences that will associate into a desired conformation. Nucleic acid design is central to the fields of
DNA nanotechnology and
DNA computing. It is necessary because there are many possible
sequences of nucleic acid strands that will fold into a given
secondary structure, but many of these sequences will have undesired additional interactions which must be avoided. In addition, there are many
tertiary structure considerations which affect the choice of a secondary structure for a given design.