NanoMuscle​

        Most historians credit the concept of nanotechnology to physicist Richard Feynman, who gave the speech '’There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom’’ in 1959. As Feynman envisioned, nanorobotics has flourished in the past sixty years. Scientists create a new era of nanotechnology. Its material includes small molecules, macromolecules such as DNA, and bacteria or viruses in some cases . Although there are many ways to build nanorobots, most applications focus on drug delivery and bio-sensor.

 

        DNA is a convenient material to construct versatile nano-scale structures called DNA origami. With this technique, we can easily direct the self-assembly of nanoparticles [A-1], and perform targeted drug delivery with logic-gated "DNA origami nanorobots” [A-2]. However, it is difficult to manipulate the motion of DNA origami with precise control of its direction and displacement. Therefore, in order to mimic the motions of traditional machines and human, directed motion is an essential component in nanorobots.

 

        In our project, we take inspiration from muscle. Muscle is a hierarchically organized tissue. It is composed of many myofibrils as the smallest elements. While consuming ATP, muscle tissues could contract and extend in one direction. Our purpose is to build a DNA origami to mimic myofibrils. Our DNA origami structure is called NanoMuscle, which performs directed motion with constant stretching length. When the specific fuel sequences exist rather than anti-fuel sequences, the NanoMuscle would transform from extended form to contracted form. In addition, NanoMuscle could be easily connected in series, in parallel, or even in a multi-dimensional way [A-3]. This characteristic makes it flexible to constitute components with different strength or length that can be applied in DNA nanorobots.

 

        NanoMuscle could provide DNA nanorobots a novel application of precisely directed motion and quantitative stretching. We expect that NanoMuscle could promote the development and create more possibilities of DNA nanorobots.

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