The design of autonomous DNA nano-mechanical devices: Walking and rolling DNA
Natural Computing: an international journal
Design of autonomous DNA cellular automata
DNA'05 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on DNA Computing
Design, simulation, and experimental demonstration of self-assembled DNA nanostructures and motors
UPP'04 Proceedings of the 2004 international conference on Unconventional Programming Paradigms
DNA'04 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on DNA computing
Arithmetical Analysis of Biomolecular Finite Automaton
Fundamenta Informaticae
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Imagine a host of nanoscale DNA robots move autonomously over a microscale DNA nanostructure, each following a programmable route and serving as a nanoparticle and/or an information carrier. The accomplishment of this goal has many applications in nanorobotics, nano-fabrication, nano-electronics, nano-diagnostics/therapeutics, and nano-computing. Recent success in constructing large scale DNA nanostructures in a programmable way provides the structural basis to meet the above challenge. The missing link is a DNA walker that can autonomously move along a route programmably embedded in the underlying nanostructure – existing synthetic DNA mechanical devices only exhibit localized non-extensible motions such as bi-directional rotation, open/close, and contraction/extension, mediated by external environmental changes. We describe in this paper two designs of autonomous DNA walking devices in which a walker moves along a linear track unidirectionally. The track of each device consists of a periodic linear array of anchorage sites. A walker sequentially steps over the anchorages in an autonomous unidirectional way. Each walking device makes use of alternating actions of restriction enzymes and ligase to achieve unidirectional translational motion.