Fig. 3: Temperature dependence of the engine’s switching dynamics.
A Representative trajectories of the RNA-powered engine recorded at various temperatures (15–45 °C), illustrating transitions between the folded and unfolded states (RNA: 5 nM, RNase H: 11 nM). Black lines represent trajectories derived from a 20-s running average of the bead’s position. The leftmost colored segments denote the control states: unfolded (blue) for the engine alone and folded (red) for the engine with RNA linker only. Histograms on the right display the corresponding relative position distributions for each trajectory. B–F Cumulative distribution functions of the unfolded dwell times (τO, blue) and folded dwell times (τC, red) at different temperatures. Solid curves represent double-exponential fits used to extract characteristic time constants. N is the particle number and n is switching event number. G Extracted τO and τC values as a function of temperature. Both time constants decrease with increasing temperature, indicating that hybridization and enzymatic cleavage rates are thermally accelerated. The τO and τC are expressed as mean +/− standard error based on 1000 bootstrap resamples. Data were collected with a frame rate of 20 FPS. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
