Related papers: DNA nanotechnology for building artificial dynamic…
Coordinating functional parts to operate in concert is essential for machinery. In gear trains, meshed gears are compactly interlocked, working together to impose rotation or translation. In photosynthetic systems, a variety of biological…
DNA nanostructures are made using synthetic DNA strands, the sequences of which are designed such that they will self-assemble into the desired form by hybridization of complementary domains. Various structures and devices have been…
Biological materials are self-assembled with near-atomic precision in living cells, whereas synthetic 3D structures generally lack such precision and controllability. Recently, DNA nanotechnology, especially DNA origami technology, has been…
Synthetic molecular motors are an appealing means to control motion at the nanoscale, but understanding their behaviour as single-molecule actuators and integrating them into larger, functional systems remain technical challenges.…
Flow-driven rotary motors drive functional processes in human society such as windmills and water wheels. Although examples of such rotary motors also feature prominently in cell biology, their synthetic construction at the nanoscale has…
Rotary motors play key roles in energy transduction, from macroscale windmills to nanoscale turbines such as ATP synthase in cells. Despite our capabilities to construct engines at many scales, developing functional synthetic turbines at…
DNA nanotechnology allows for the realization of complex nanoarchitectures in which the spatial arrangements of different constituents and most functions can be enabled by DNA. When optically active components are integrated in such…
This paper presents a molecular mechanics study for new nanorobotic structures using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations coupled to virtual reality (VR) techniques. The operator can design and characterize through molecular dynamics…
DNA origami consists of a long scaffold strand and short staple strands that self-assemble into a target 2D or 3D shape. It is a widely used construct in nucleic acid nanotechnology, offering a cost-effective way to design and create…
DNA nanotechnology promises to provide controllable self-assembly on the nanoscale, allowing for the design of static structures, dynamic machines and computational architectures. In this article I review the state-of-the art of DNA…
Artificial nanowalkers are inspired by biomolecular counterparts from living cells, but remain far from comparable to the latter in design principles. The walkers reported to date mostly rely on chemical mechanisms to gain a direction; they…
Cell is the structural and functional unit of life. This Resource Letter serves as a guide to the literature on nano-machines which drive not only intracellular movements, but also motility of the cell. These machines are usually proteins…
Sliding is one of the fundamental mechanical movements in machinery. In macroscopic systems, double-rack pinion machines employ gears to slide two linear tracks along opposite directions. In microscopic systems, kinesin-5 proteins crosslink…
Nucleic acids, like DNA and RNA, are molecules that are present in any life form. Their most notable function is to encode biological information. Why then would a physicist be interested in these molecules? As we will see, DNA is an…
The DNA molecule, apart from carrying the genetic information, plays a crucial role in a variety of biological processes and find applications in drug design, nanotechnology and nanoelectronics. The molecule undergoes significant structural…
The specificity and simplicity of the Watson-Crick base pair interactions make DNA one of the most versatile construction materials for creating nanoscale structures and devices. Among several DNA-based approaches, the DNA origami technique…
Biological functions in each animal cell depend on coordinated operations of a wide variety of molecular motors. Some of the these motors transport cargo to their respective destinations whereas some others are mobile workshops which…
Electrochemical Biosensors are uniquely positioned to offer real-time in vivo molecular sensing due to their robustness to both biofluids and contaminants found in biofluids, and their adaptability for the detection of different analytes by…
Nanoscale biosystems are widely used in numerous medical applications. The approaches for structure and function of the nanomachines that are available in the cell (natural nanomachines) are discussed. Molecular simulation studies have been…
Neural networks based on soft and biological matter constitute an interesting potential alternative to traditional implementations based on electric circuits. DNA is a particularly promising system in this context due its natural ability to…