Due to their outstanding contribution of "molecular machine design and synthesis", three scientists from the United States, France and the Netherlands were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2016. These machines can be described as "the smallest machine", only one thousandth of the size of human hair. Molecular machine is the concept of macro-machine extended to the molecular level. It refers to the independent molecules or molecular assembly which can implement similar machine movement under appropriate external stimulus. A series of important progress in the research of molecular machines by Professor Shi Shuo and Professor Yao Tianming has been made. Their long-term commitment to molecular machine research will contribute to the diagnosis and cure of the disease in the near future.

Based on the conformational changes of DNA, the research group successfully constructed the multiple molecular devices as encoder, decoder, multiplexer, demultiplexer, odd even number discriminator, etc. with the characteristics of G-quadruple and nano-silver cluster. These molecular devices will have great potential in the diagnosis and treatment of related diseases, for example, multiplexers can be used for the diagnosis of hepatitis and it can effectively distinguish between hepatitis B patients and hepatitis B virus carriers. The first author of the paper is Gao Ruru, with Professor Shi Shuo and Professor Yao Tianming as the co-author of the paper.

In another study on molecular machines, the research group constructed a series of molecular logic gates, and then realized the logic gate cascade, successfully set the DNA molecular code lock based on the human proto-oncogene. The related research results "A RET -supported Logic Gate Combinatorial Library to Enable Modeling and Implementation of Intelligent Logic Functions "was also published on Chemical Science (2016, 7, 1853-1861).