On Aug. 13, 2026, Salk Institute researchers announce recording the stepping motion of RNA polymerase along DNA using long-lasting fluorescent DNA origami nanostructures that track life’s smallest movements.

Scientists often describe life as a series of chemical reactions. Pallav Kosuri, PhD, describes life as movement. Chemical reactions are how you drive the movement of atoms, proteins, cells, and bodies—without movement, there is no life.

“If you don’t know how something moves, you don’t know what it does,” says Kosuri. “And if you want to understand, manipulate, and alter the function of molecules, understanding their physical movements is just as important as understanding their chemical reactions. The difference is: We have a comprehensive catalog of the chemical reactions, while the mechanical side is still the Wild West.”

Kosuri’s lab is setting out to change that. They started with DNA origami, a method that uses DNA building blocks to create custom, self-assembling nanostructures with a range of applications—drug delivery, lab-on-a chip devices, and now foundational biological discovery. Then they developed ORBIT, a method that uses DNA origami to build fluorescent nanostructures for visualizing molecular movements.

Technical limitations have long made it difficult or impossible to measure molecular movement over extended periods. Fluorescence microscopy is a powerful technology, but observation times are limited by the amount of time the fluorescent tags remain bright—over time, they always go dark.

Their latest work, published in Cell Reports Methods on August 13, 2026, overcomes this challenge with a novel “dye-cycling” strategy for ORBIT that constantly replenishes fluorescent tags, extending the measurement time window from seconds to hours. This allowed them to measure the rotation of a single RNA polymerase molecule as it “reads” DNA with base-pair resolution and over unprecedented lengths of time. The new method could provide critical mechanical insights into how genes are transcribed in cells.

Dye-cycling ORBIT will be an essential tool to explore that mechanical side of biomolecules as Kosuri’s lab continues to pioneer DNA origami research. Studying the fundamental rotational movements that underly gene expression will deepen scientific understanding of the genome, its products, and how cells function or malfunction.