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Dai, Colin

University of British Columbia

Inspired by biological motors, artificially designed molecular motors were developed in recent years. Despite promising, these artificial molecular motors suffer from poor performance due to challenges in tuning the kinetics of enzymes used in current motor systems. Therefore, this thesis aims to design and construct a highly tunable molecular rolling motor using DNA-based enzymes. We first removed the non-specific interaction between the rolling particle and surface. Then, we aim to understand what could happen before and after the DNAzyme cleavage. As a result, we investigated the binding and releasing of DNA oligonucleotides without DNAzyme. Through this study, the first rolling motor powered by 17E DNAzyme was constructed. However, this DNAzyme-based rolling motor did not work as expected. As a result, we systematically investigated the cause of this, which led us to study the enzyme kinetics of a DNAzyme with different recognition arms. Using FRET-based sensors, we systematically characterized the catalytic rates of an array of different DNAzymes. This finding will help us maximize the overall performance of the DNAzyme towards designing DNAzyme-based molecular rolling motors.

Text

2021-08-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/79563

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/