Toward self-assembly of phage-like nanorobot

The assembly of DNA nanostructures can allow for promising nanometer-sized machines. Synthetic DNA motifs are known to assemble into a wide range of nanoarchitectures by sequence programming. For the purpose of constructing strictly-controlled biological nanomachines, we design the self-assembly system consisting of DNA strands with the ability of producing a functional molecule. In this work we demonstrate that DNA motifs can form the programmed structure without loss of the target function. These results indicate that synthetic DNA molecules can provide both a packaging framework and an inner function to construct a phage-like nanorobot. We expect that our design concept makes a contribution to the establishment of the platform technology for new biomolecular machines to control biological systems in the natural environment.