Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 14
Nucleic Acid Enzyme-Based DNA Nanomachine
for Biosensing
Di Li and Chunhai Fan
Abstract
The mechanical motion of DNA nanomachine is driven by the chemical
entropies that are released from the stimuli-induced structural variations of DNA
nanostructures. Up to now, several stimuli have been proposed. In this chapter, we
will discuss nucleic acid enzymes as a distinct stimulus to drive DNA nanomachines
and its applications in biosensing are also mentioned as well.
Keywords
DNA
machine
•
Nucleic
acid
enzymes
•
Signal
amplification
•
Structural variation
14.1
Introduction
The unique molecular recognition properties of DNA have been harnessed for
bottom-up construction of nanostructures that display controllable mechanical
movements, which are defined as DNA nanomachines. The driving force for
mechanical movements of DNA machines is chemical enthalpies that are released
from the stimuli-induced structural variations of DNA nanostructures. The structural
variations could be either conformational or sequence changes of DNA strands. The
former example includes the Co(NH
3
)
6
3C
-induced B-Z transition [
1
], pH-driving
i-motif DNA motor [
2
,
3
], and metal ion-sensitive G-quadruplex DNA pinching [
4
],
while the latter one includes the sequence changes DNA nanostructures, resulting
mechanical movement, such as DNA tweezers [
5
]andDNAwalkers[
6
].
Several stimuli were developed so far to induce the sequence changes of DNA
strand in DNA nanostructures. One example is an external fuel DNA that is used
in strand displacement or “branch migration” reactions [
7
,
8
]. The essence of stand
D. Li (
)•C.Fan(
)
Laboratory of Physical Biology, Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy
of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China
e-mail:
lidi@sinap.ac.cn
;
fchh@sinap.ac.cn
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