Superhydrophobic textile fabrics are prepared by a simple, one‐step gas phase coating procedure by which a layer of polymethylsilsesquioxane nanofilaments is grown onto the individual textile fibers. A total of 11 textile fabrics made from natural and man made fibers are successfully coated and their superhydrophobic properties evaluated by the water shedding angle technique. A thorough investigation of the commercially relevant poly(ethylene terephthalate) fabric reveals an unparalleled long‐term water resistance and stability of the superhydrophobic effect. Because of the special surface geometry generated by the nanoscopic, fibrous coating on the microscopic, fibrous textiles, the coated fabric remains completely dry even after two months of full immersion in water and stays superhydrophobic even after continuous rubbing with a skin simulating friction partner under significant load. Furthermore, important textile parameters such as tensile strength, color, and haptics are unaffected by the silicone nanofilament coating. For the first time, an in‐depth characterization of the wetting properties, beyond simple contact angle measurements, as well as a thorough evaluation of the most important textile parameters is performed on a superhydrophobic fabric, which reveals a true potential for application.

Silicone nanofilaments (see figure) are grown by a simple chemical vapor deposition method on different substrate materials. The filaments are flexible, and have lengths of up to several micrometers and diameters of up to 150 nm. The dense and entangled arrangement of these filaments yields a superhydrophobic coating that is also optically transparent and antireflective.

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A new technique is introduced to evaluate the wetting properties of superhydrophobic textiles which are not accessible by classical contact angle measurement techniques. The principle behind the new water shedding angle technique is the ability of a superhydrophobic surface to repel drops of water upon impact. In this sense it shows a strong reference to application and its results are easily understood in terms of water protection. The procedure is simple and straightforward and the experimental setup can be easily built or adapted to most available contact angle measurement systems. In view of the significant potential of superhydrophobic coatings for textile applications, the water shedding angle provides a reliable and comparable measure to judge the quality of a superhydrophobic textile in terms of water repellency. It constitutes a useful addition to existing techniques and has proven to be better suited to evaluate the wetting properties of superhydrophobic textiles than the contemporary methods presently in use.

Since Seemans pioneering work, [1a-c] DNA has been recognized as a building material for programmable hollow 3D nanoobjects. DNA nanoconstruction benefits from the structural rigidity of short DNA double strands, scalability, good accessibility of synthetic and chemically modified DNA, and the option for enzymatic amplification and processing. Four strategies for the construction of nanoobjects such as polyhedra exist so far. Strategy I is vertex-centered and goes from noncovalent junctions to covalent objects: Noncovalent three-way junctions are assembled from three linear oligonucleotides. Each arm contains a sticky end sequence which is hybridized to its complement in another junction and then covalently connected by DNA ligases.[1] Strategy II is the reverse of strategy I and makes use of trisoligonucleotides, in other words covalent junctions are noncovalently assembled to give the target nanoobjects.[2d, e] Non-natural modes of copying [2a] and amplifying [2b] were proposed to enable the replication of junctions and nanoconstructs from the latter.[2c]Strategy III is a face-centered approach, employing as many oligonucleotides as there are faces on the object while each oligonucleotide is composed of as many segments as there are edges surrounding the faces.[3a-d] Strategy IV first defines the longest path through the object by connecting all vertices using a very long DNA single strand; a set of shorter oligonucleotides generates suitable rigid motifs such as double crossovers, while additional connectivities are expressed by means of paranemic crossover motifs. [4] Recently the assembly of triangular prisms, cubes, pentameric and hexameric prisms, heteroprisms, and biprisms was reported. A set of single-stranded linear and cyclic DNA building blocks was used, and in the latter case rigid organic linker molecules were used as vertices.[5]Herein we report on a new generation of trisoligonucleotides and their employment in benchmark experiments to evaluate strategy II. We selected a dodecahedron, as polyhedra with a smaller number of vertices have been described already. [1][2][3][4][5] The feasibility of constructing a dodecahedron that reflects the basic symmetry of a virus was forseen for strategy III, [1d] but so far this has not been achieved by any strategy.Previously prepared trisoligonucleotides with three different arms were based on asymmetric linker constructs, [2a, e, f, 6] so that in principle a set of three different sequences could be connected in three different ways. Linker scaffolds with C 3h symmetry are thought to be advantageous because all vertices are expected to be subject to the same conformational constraints. Moreover, diastereomeric mixtures obtained by the utilization of commercially available racemic linker amidites [6b, 7] are avoided here. Until now trisoligonucleotides with C 3h linkers were synthesized by chemical copying of connectivity, that is the usage of a 3'-connected trisoligonucleotide template for the trislinking of suitable 5'-functionalized linear oligonucleo...