The rise of material science and nanotechnology created a demand for a next generation of materials and procedures that can transcend the shaping of simple geometrical nano-objects. As a legacy of the technological progress made in the Human Genome Project, DNA was identified as a possible candidate. The low production costs of custom-made DNA molecules and the possibilities concerning the structural manipulation triggered significant advances in the field of DNA nanotechnology in the last decade. To facilitate the development of new DNA nanostructures and provide users an insight in less intuitive complexities and physical properties of the DNA folding, several in silico modelling tools were published. Here, we summarize the main characteristics of these specialised tools, describe the most common design principles and discuss tools and strategies used to predict the properties of DNA nanostructures.

材料科学和纳米技术的兴起产生了对下一代材料和程序的需求，这些材料和程序可以超越简单的几何纳米物体的形状。作为人类基因组计划取得的技术进步的遗产，DNA被确定为可能的候选者。定制DNA分子的低生产成本以及涉及结构操纵的可能性在过去十年中触发了DNA纳米技术领域的重大进步。为了促进新DNA纳米结构的开发并向用户提供DNA折叠不太直观的复杂性和物理特性的见解，一些计算机建模工具已发布。在这里，我们总结了这些专用工具的主要特征，描述了最常见的设计原理，并讨论了用于预测DNA纳米结构特性的工具和策略。