Programmable motion of an enzyme-powered macroscale gel boat: a functional sensing platform

Abstract

An augmented strategy for constructing intelligent soft robots includes the transfer of biogenic features from nature to man-made artificial systems serving a range of life-like functions. Inspired by living technology, we have customized macroscale hydrogel boats by encoding them with an enzyme-powered engine that can convert chemical information into a mechanical response to create motion at the air–water interface. The engine's non-homogeneous enzyme distribution causes erratic motion along straight lines, random turns, and turns with high or low curvature-like trajectories. Nevertheless, the structural remodeling of the boat as well as the working system's configuration can permit directed, controlled, turning, bi-directional, rotation and run-and-tumble-like motion. Intriguingly, this boat is capable of sensing the precise chirality of amino acids (D-amino acid vs. L-amino acid) from individual isomer samples by translating the chiral information into variations in the boat's speed. Therefore, such miniaturized enzyme-powered boats are anticipated to be an advantage for the upcoming next-generation materials with a broader spectrum of functionalities.