Specificity to a particular sequence target is attached to a DNA dendrimer in a manner similar to the assembly of dendrimers themselves. For instance, to make a 4-layer HIV specific dendrimer, two reagents are needed: the core 4-layer dendrimer and an oligonucleotide complementary to both HIV and to dendrimer sequence. The 4-layer dendrimer has 324 arms available for binding on its outer surface, one half of the arms with a(+) sequence, the other half with c(+) sequence. Typically only one type of the outer arms is used to confer specificity to a particular target. An oligonucleotide containing a(-) and complementary HIV-LTR sequences would be hybridized to 4-layer dendrimers via the a(+) sequence on the outer surface, thus yielding 4-layer HIV specific DNA dendrimers.

2 Layer