Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on January 30, 2007
Nucleic Acids Research 2007 35(5):e33; doi:10.1093/nar/gkl1161
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, Vol. 35, No. 5 e33
© 2007 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Methods Online |
Alternating-electric-field-enhanced reversible switching of DNA nanocontainers with pH
1National Centre for NanoScience and Technology, Beijing 100080, China, 2Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China and 3Department of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +86 10 82615073; Fax: +86 10 62652116; Email: liuds{at}nanoctr.cn Correspondence may also be addressed to Lei Jiang. Tel: +86 10 82621396; Fax: +86 10 82627566; Email: jianglei{at}iccas.ac.cn
Received November 5, 2006. Revised December 17, 2006. Accepted December 19, 2006.
Macroscopically realizable applications of DNA-based molecular devices require individual molecules to cooperate with each other. However, molecular crowding usually introduces disorder to the system, thus jeopardizing the molecular cooperation and slowing down their functional performance dramatically. A challenge remaining in this field is to obtain both smarter response and better cooperation simultaneously. Here, we report a swift-switching DNA nanodevice that is enhanced by an alternating electric field. The device, self-assembled from folded four-stranded DNA motifs, can robustly switch between closed and open states in smart response to pH stimulus, of which the closed state forms a nanometer-height container that is impermeable to small molecules. This character was used to directly and non-specifically catch and release small molecules emulating mechanical hand in a controllable way. The alternating electric field was used to accelerate molecular cooperative motion during the device switching, which in turn shortened the closing time remarkably to thirty seconds.