DNA Nanomachine with Multitentacles for Integral Processing of Nanoparticles and Its Application in Biosensing

DNA nanomachines developed by DNA nanotechnology, an attractive branch of nanoengineering, have been widely applied in drug delivery, biomarker detection, etc. However, the existing DNA nanomachines are mainly conducted in solution systems and the application of surface-confined DNA nanomachines is limited due to the less variety and lower efficiency than those in a solution. The efficiency is greatly limited due to the fact that the surface-confined substances cannot freely perform the Brownian movement, which is not conducive to performance improvement. In this work, we proposed a DNA nanomachine with multitentacles based on the multivalent effect and confirmed that the processing efficiency of multitentacles is much higher than that of a single tentacle by kinetic experiments. Interestingly, a multitentacle DNA nanomachine enables stable capture and integral processing of nanoparticles through only one collision between the surface and the nanoparticle, avoiding the loss of efficiency caused by repeated collisions. In addition, a multitentacle DNA nanomachine-based immunoassay exhibits comparable sensitivity to traditional enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) methods in practical applications. Therefore, it is believed that the construction and application of a multitentacle DNA nanomachine expand the application of DNA nanomachines in interfacial biosensing systems, e.g., ELISA and electrochemical biosensors, and provide ideas for the design of other nanomachines working on the interface.