A Unidirectional DNA Walker That Moves Autonomously along a Track

Abstract

There's no turning back for an autonomous DNA walker that moves along a self‐assembled track, driven by the hydrolysis of ATP. The track contains three anchorages (A, B, C) at which the walker (★), a six‐nucleotide DNA fragment, can be bound (see figure). The motion of the walker is unidirectional. At each step it is ligated to the next anchorage, then cut from the previous one by a restriction endonuclease.

Programmable disorder in random DNA tilings

“…The first generation of DNA robots were developed to make a few steps on one-dimensional tracks consisting of a double helix. [21][22][23] After DNA origami was invented, it was used as a two-dimensional playground for DNA robots with more interesting functions, including following a path, 24 picking up cargos in an assembly line, 25 and making choices at multiple junctions. 26 The complexity of playgrounds for DNA robots not only affects the functions that can be demonstrated, but also determines how we can evaluate the designed behaviors.…”

Direct observation of stepwise movement of a synthetic molecular transporter

“…This precisely controlled, long-range transport could lead to the development of systems that could be programmed and routed by instructions encoded in the nucleotide sequences of the track and motor. Such systems might be used to create molecular assembly lines modelled on the ribosome.An effective linear molecular motor must traverse its track without dissociating [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]10,12 and run unidirectionally without external intervention [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] . Directionality may be imposed by the sequential addition of DNA instructions 1-3 or, for autonomous motors, by modifying the track sites that have been visited 5,6,12 , by coupling motion to a unidirectional reaction cycle 4,9,12 or by coordinating the conformation changes of different parts of the motor 11,12 .…”

“…Directionality may be imposed by the sequential addition of DNA instructions 1-3 or, for autonomous motors, by modifying the track sites that have been visited 5,6,12 , by coupling motion to a unidirectional reaction cycle 4,9,12 or by coordinating the conformation changes of different parts of the motor 11,12 . DNA motors that satisfy all these criteria have typically been demonstrated on tracks that allow only 1-3 steps, although a stochastic DNA 'spider' with many legs has been shown to move longer distances by biased diffusion 17 along a 100 nm track 18 .…”

“…Controlled motion at the nanoscale can be achieved by using Watson-Crick base-pairing to direct the assembly and operation of a molecular transport system consisting of a track, a motor [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] and fuel [13][14][15] , all made from DNA. Here, we assemble a 100-nm-long DNA track on a two-dimensional scaffold 16 , and show that a DNA motor loaded at one end of the track moves autonomously and at a constant average speed along the full length of the track, a journey comprising 16 consecutive steps for the motor.…”

A DNA Nanotransport Device Powered by Polymerase ϕ29

“…In recent years, there has been tremendous progress in DNA based nanodevices [3,11,12,19,20,25,26,29,30,42,43,[53][54][55]. Recent research has explored DNA as a material for self-assembly of nanoscale objects [10,18,21,24,35,49,51,52], for performing computation [2, 6-8, 22, 23, 47, 48, 50], and for the construction of nanomechanical devices [3, 11-13, 19, 25, 29, 36-39, 42, 44, 45, 53, 56, 57].…”