DNA motors, which mimic natural motor proteins by converting chemical energy into mechanical motion, are emerging as versatile tools for dynamic nanotechnology, biosensing, and drug delivery. Motor translocation relies on a catalytic cycle of binding, enzymatic cleavage, and rebinding between DNA “legs” on the motor body and nucleic acid “footholds” on a track. Here, we investigate how the thermodynamic properties of oligonucleotides affect motor kinetics, addressing the long-standing trade-off between speed and processivity. By systematically varying DNA leg length and GC content, we show that motor performance in terms of displacement, velocity, processivity, and sensing, can be finely tuned through leg-foothold affinity. Remarkably, motors with 0% GC content reach instantaneous velocities up to 150 nm/s, three-fold greater than previously reported DNA motors and comparable to the speeds of biological motor proteins such as dynein and kinesin. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these re-engineered motors can function as sensitive chemical-to-mechanical transducers: their high speed and reduced force output produce a clear mechanical stall signal in response to nucleic acid targets, achieving single-molecule detection. Together, these results provide design principles for high-performance DNA motors with broad potential applications, from disease biomarker monitoring to environmental sensing.
Zhang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.