ArticleNature nanotechnology2025
An information ratchet improves selectivity in molecular recognition under non-equilibrium conditions.
Article in Nature nanotechnology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Autonomous migration of a phosphate group along glycerol and inositol scaffolds driven by a phosphodiester reaction cycle.Nature chemistry · 2026Article
- Transient Activation Windows Program Adaptive Photochemical Responses.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Article
- Steric-Engineered Thermodynamic Gating: Metastable Assemblies for Chemical-Class Discrimination of Synthetic Cannabinoids.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Article
- Tangled Tail of Mechanically Interlocked Peptides.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026Review
- Enzyme-Free Phosphorylation with Kinetic Gating in a De Novo Coiled-Coil System.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026Article
- Recent Advancements in Information Ratchet Design.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Setting a direction for molecular recognition.Nature nanotechnology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Molecular recognition is essential for controlling chemical processes, passing molecular instructions to elicit responses including structure formation, signalling and replication. Usually, the selectivity of molecular recognition is under thermodynamic control; however, when a higher fidelity is required, nature improves recognition selectivity by an error correction mechanism under an energy-dissipating kinetic-control regime. Here, exploiting DNA hybridization as a model, we present an abiotic example of an information ratchet mechanism that increases selectivity for the 'correct' duplex from 2:1 at equilibrium to 6:1 under energy-dissipating conditions. Structural asymmetry in the DNA strands introduces kinetic asymmetry in the reaction network, enabling enrichment under non-equilibrium conditions. We quantify the free-energy cost associated with enhanced selectivity using Shannon entropy formalism, finding that an increase in information of 0.33 bits is associated with at least 3.0 kJ mol
Identifiers
40750670What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.