PNA-Driven Remote Actuation of DNA Nanospring Strain Sensors
Abstract
The purpose of this work is to use a natural biomaterial, DNA, to create helical, spring nanosensors.These nanosprings can act like passive molecular rulers to measure strain in soft materials rangingfrom muscle to skin or soft plastic. Further, these nanosprings can become active, contractilestructures and can be reversibly actuated to change conformation from untwisted to twisted usingrationally designed strand displacement reactions. The PI will use an engineering approach to turnthis nanospring platform into a biometric sensor. For this, three challenges must be addressed.Spring-like sensors must be modified at each edge to functionalize them to attach to surfaces andembed in matrices for transducing environmental signals like strain and stiffening. Next, in order toreport that information in real-time, strain-sensitive geometries must be designed to allow sensorconformation change (e.g. strain or untwisting) to be converted into changes in optical output.Finally, we will investigate strategies for strand-displacement reactions to contract these constructson demand and optimize that process by driving those reactions with peptide nucleic acid fuelstrands. As a result of this work, passive nanospring strain sensors could track soldier biometricslike muscle contraction as well as muscle growth or atrophy in response to military training andphysically stressful missions. Small enough to permeate tissue, the active (remotely actuatable)version of this spring could measure muscle stiffness and with the administration of a shape changeinducer, these ensembles of structures could potentially be used to provide assistive contractileforce from within a tissue.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jun 11, 2018
- Source ID
- FA95501810199
Entities
People
- Rebecca C Taylor
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- United States Air Force