To sustain cellular functions, a cell needs to transport a variety of cargos within the complex intracellular milieu. This task is mainly carried out by molecular motors that move along filament tracks. Despite the grand challenges to fully understand how cells exactly manage to execute all their intelligent functions, construction of artificial nanosystems by taking inspiration from the working principles that cellular components follow, is undoubtedly an intellectually efficient approach.

In this talk, we will show several types of bio-inspired optical nanosystems, which can perform rotation, twisting, or swinging motions enabled by dynamic DNA nanotechnology. Our approach outlines a general scheme to build dynamic plasmonic nanoarchitectures, in which multiple optical elements can be readily reconfigured or transported to designated locations over long distances, resulting in programmed structural changes with high fidelity. Such plasmonic structures can find useful applications in different fields, ranging from optical sensing to data storage. In particular, the possibility to translocate optical elements in multiple configurations can be used to explore new approaches to encode information at high density.