Bioinspired nanorobots rely on autonomous structural reconfiguration to adapt to environmental cues, yet achieving such behavior remains difficult due to an intrinsic trade-off between structural robustness and rapid responsiveness. Here, we present a reconfiguration strategy that leverages toehold-mediated strand displacement reactions within structurally stable meta-DNA (M-DNA) assemblies. Coupling this strategy with cooperative DNA catalysis accelerates reconfiguration by more than an order of magnitude, reducing the reconfiguration time from over 12 h to less than 2 h and achieving a maximum rate constant of 1.88 × 105 M-1 s-1. Molecular dynamics simulations reveal that M-DNA catalytic reconfiguration occurs via cooperative multivalent pathways, enabling efficient strand displacement and structural reconfiguration. Furthermore, by integrating modular design with catalytic acceleration, we achieve rapid and programmable reconfigurations across hierarchical M-DNA assemblies. This strategy overcomes the intrinsic trade-off between structural robustness and dynamic adaptability in submicron DNA assemblies, establishing a generalizable principle for engineering adaptive biomimetic nanostructures.
Qi et al. (Mon,) studied this question.