Twirling DNA Rings - Swimming Nanomotors Ready for a Kickstart

Abstract

We propose a rotary DNA nanomachine that shows a continuous rotation with a frequency of 10^2 -10^4 Hz. This motor consists of a DNA ring whose elastic features are tuned such that it can be externally driven via a periodic temperature change. As a result the ring propels itself through the fluid with a speed up to microns per second.

arXiv comment4 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Brownian motors: noisy transport far from equilibrium
• Hydrodynamic fluctuations and instabilities in ordered suspensions of self-propelled particles
• Chromatin dynamics: Nucleosomes go mobile through twist defects

Cited by in corpus (10)

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• Mechanical Response of a Small Swimmer Driven by Conformational Transitions
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• Stochastic Low Reynolds Number Swimmers
• Brownian dynamics of a microswimmer
• Jet propulsion without inertia
• Stokesian jellyfish: Viscous locomotion of bilayer vesicles
• Regularized Stokeslet rings - an efficient method for axisymmetric Stokes flow, with application to the growing pollen tube
• Transport and bistable kinetics of a Brownian particle in a nonequilibrium environment
• Parametric excitation of rotational soft modes of the buckled discrete elastic ring