Realizing mechanical frustration at the nanoscale using DNA origami

作者：Anirudh S. Madhvacharyula, Ruixin Li, Alexander A. Swett, Yancheng Du, Seongmin Seo, Friedrich C. Simmel, Jong Hyun Choi · 发表于：Nature Communications · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1038/s41467-025-60492-z · 被引用次数：13 · 研究领域：Advanced biosensing and bioanalysis techniques、Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata、RNA Interference and Gene Delivery

Structural designs inspired by physical and biological systems have been previously utilized to develop mechanical metamaterials with enhanced properties based on clever geometric arrangement of constituent building blocks. Here, we use the DNA origami method to realize a nanoscale metastructure exhibiting mechanical frustration, a counterpart of the well-known phenomenon of magnetic frustration. By selectively actuating reconfigurable struts, it adopts either frustrated or non-frustrated states, each characterized by distinct free energy profiles. While the non-frustrated state distributes the strain homogeneously, the frustrated mode concentrates it at a specific location. Molecular dynamics simulations reconcile the contrasting behaviors and provide insights into underlying mechanics. We explore the design space further by tailoring responses through structural modifications. Our work combines programmable DNA self-assembly with mechanical design principles to overcome engineering limitations encountered at the macroscale to design dynamic, deformable nanostructures with potential applications in elastic energy storage, nanomechanical computation, and allosteric mechanisms in DNA-based nanomachinery. Structural designs based on the geometric arrangement of their building blocks have been utilized to develop advanced mechanical metamaterials. Here, the authors use the DNA origami method to realize a nanoscale metastructure exhibiting mechanical frustration, the mechanical c...