Bottom-up approaches

These seek to arrange smaller components into more complex assemblies.

* DNA nanotechnology utilizes the specificity of Watson-Crick basepairing to construct well-defined structures out of DNA and other nucleic acids.

* Approaches from the field of "classical" chemical synthesis also aim at designing molecules with well-defined shape

* More generally, molecular self-assembly seeks to use concepts of supramolecular chemistry, and molecular recognition in particular, to cause single-molecule components to automatically arrange themselves into some useful conformation.