DNA Nanorobot Cargo Release

A DNA-origami box shaped like a small nanorobot holds its lid shut with a handful of duplex "lock" strands. Adding a complementary trigger strand starts toehold-mediated strand displacement at each lock — a real, well-characterized DNA nanotechnology mechanism — and once enough locks have been displaced (an AND-gate threshold, exactly as in antigen-triggered payload nanorobots), the lid swings open and the enclosed cargo escapes by Brownian diffusion. Tune toehold length, trigger concentration, the number of locks required, and temperature to see how each one changes the unlocking kinetics and the release rate, both computed from their real governing equations.