Peng Yin, Andrew Turberfield, & John Reif
In Proc. Tenth International Meeting on DNA Computing, 2004, to appear
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Abstract: 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.
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