Peng Yin, Hao Yan, Xiaoju Daniell, Andrew Turberfield, & John Reif
In Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 43, September 2004. pp. 4906-4911
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Abstract: we report the design and construction
of an autonomous, unidirectional DNA motor that moves along a DNA track.
The self-assembled track contains three anchorages at which the walker, a
six-nucleotide DNA fragment, can be bound. At each step the walker is ligated
to the next anchorage, then cut from the previous one by a restriction endonuclease.
Each cut destroys the previous restriction site, and each ligation creates
a new site, in such a way that the walker can not move backwards. The motor
is powered by the hydrolysis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a kinetically
inert fuel whose breakdown may be accelerated by many orders of magnitude
by protein catalysts. The operation of the motor was verified by tracking
the radioactively labeled walker by gel electrophoresis.
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