Biocatalytic Buoyancy-Driven Nanobots for Autonomous Cell Recognition and Enrichment

Abstract

Highlights

A self-propelled, biocatalytic buoyancy-driven metal–organic framework (MOF) nanobot is developed.

The anti-carcinoembryonic antigen antibody functionalized MOF nanobot demonstrates directional vertical motion to “find-and-fetch” cancer cells from mixed cell population.

The captured cells can be recovered with full metabolic potential.

Autonomously self-propelled nanoswimmers represent the next-generation nano-devices for bio- and environmental technology. However, current nanoswimmers generate limited energy output and can only move in short distances and duration, thus are struggling to be applied in practical challenges, such as living cell transportation. Here, we describe the construction of biodegradable metal–organic framework based nanobots with chemically driven buoyancy to achieve highly efficient, long-distance, directional vertical motion to “find-and-fetch” target cells. Nanobots surface-functionalized with antibodies against the cell surface marker carcinoembryonic antigen are exploited to impart the nanobots with specific cell targeting capacity to recognize and separate cancer cells. We demonstrate that the self-propelled motility of the nanobots can sufficiently transport the recognized cells autonomously, and the separated cells can be easily collected with a customized glass column, and finally regain their full metabolic potential after the separation. The utilization of nanobots with easy synthetic pathway shows considerable promise in cell recognition, separation, and enrichment.