In general, this approach is conceptually more similar to the operational mode of biomolecular machines in the sense that the energy of a chemical fuel -an abiotic one in our case -is used to drive a conformational change of the device in a non-equilibrium fashion. We demonstrated that this is a successful strategy to control the hybridization of DNA in a simple model system, and we envision that its implementation in more complex supramolecular structures, such as DNA origami, will open new possibilities to power such structures.