Robotic DNA Nanostructures

Abstract

Over the past decade, DNA nanotechnology has spawned a broad variety of functional nanostructures tailored toward the enabled state at which applications are coming increasingly in view. One of the branches of these applications is in synthetic biology, where the intrinsic programmability of the DNA nanostructures may pave the way for smart task-specific molecular robotics. In brief, the synthesis of the user-defined artificial DNA nano-objects is based on employing DNA molecules with custom lengths and sequences as building materials that predictably assemble together by obeying Watson–Crick base pairing rules. The general workflow of creating DNA nanoshapes is getting more and more straightforward, and some objects can be designed automatically from the top down. The versatile DNA nano-objects can serve as synthetic tools at the interface with biology, for example, in therapeutics and diagnostics as dynamic logic-gated nanopills, light-, pH-, and thermally driven devices. Such diverse apparatuses can also serve as optical polarizers, sensors and capsules, autonomous cargo-sorting robots, rotary machines, precision measurement tools, as well as electric and magnetic-field directed robotic arms. In this review, we summarize the recent progress in robotic DNA nanostructures, mechanics, and their various implementations.

Unraveling the interaction between doxorubicin and DNA origami nanostructures for customizable chemotherapeutic drug release

“…The possibility to employ DNA molecules in engineering artificial nanostructures (1,2) has drawn increasing attention during the past two decades (3)(4)(5). The intense development of DNA nanotechnology has yielded new methods to build user-defined nano-objects (6), such as DNA origami (7)(8)(9)(10)(11), for a variety of scientific and technological uses (12)(13)(14)(15)(16). In particular, these custom DNA nanoshapes show considerable promise in biomedicine and drug delivery (17)(18)(19)(20)(21).…”

Endogenous Stimuli-Responsive DNA Nanostructures Toward Cancer Theranostics

“…Different from the DNA nanoaggregates, DNA origami (Zhan et al, 2014;Linko et al, 2015;Ijäs et al, 2018;Jiang et al, 2019b) featured well-shaped nanostructures with structure rigidity and sequence addressability, has been increasingly used for drug delivery. In addition to the common merits of DNA nanomaterials in biological applications, DNA origami nanostructures are capable of positioning multiple desired functional components like therapeutic agents and tumor targeting ligands in a predefined number and pattern throughout the addressable structure (Nummelin et al, 2020). In 2017, an example of reconfigurable DNA origami device that encapsulated enzyme has been reported (Grossi et al, 2017).…”

Selbstregeneration und Selbstheilung in DNA‐Origami‐Nanostrukturen

“…In den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten wurde eine Vielzahl von nanoskaligen Geräten etabliert, die als molekulare Motoren, Schalter, Pumpen oder Ratschen fungieren [1–3] . Solche Nanogeräte weisen eine hohe Funktionalität und zunehmende Komplexität auf, die durch Fortschritte in verschiedenen Bereichen angetrieben werden [4–6] . Insbesondere die DNA‐Nanotechnologie und der Fortschritt in der DNA‐Origami‐Technik haben das einfache Design und die Synthese von beispiellos komplexen Nanostrukturen mit hohen Ausbeuten ermöglicht [7–9] .…”