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posted by martyb on Sunday January 21 2018, @12:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the waiting-for-nano-baby-deliveries dept.

Tiny nano-scale machines formed from DNA could be the future of manufacturing things at small scale but great volume: drugs, tiny chip components, and of course more nanomachines. But moving simple, reusable machines like a little arm half a micrometer long is more difficult than at human scale. Wires for signals aren't possible at that scale, and if you want to move it with a second arm, how do you move that arm?

For a while chemical signals have been used; wash a certain solution over a nanobot and it changes its orientation, closes its grasping tip, or what have you. But that's slow and inexact.

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich were looking at ways to improve this situation of controlling machines at the molecular scale. They were working with "nano-cranes," which are essentially a custom 400-nanometer strand of DNA sticking up out of a substrate, with a flexible base (literally — it's made of unpaired bases) that lets it rotate in any direction. It's more like a tiny robotic finger, but let's not split hairs (or base pairs).

What Friedrich Simmel and his team found, or rather realized the potential of, was that DNA molecules and therefore these nano-cranes have a negative charge. So theoretically, they should move in response to electric fields. And that's just what they did.

[...] The team's work, which like most great research seems obvious in retrospect, earned them the coveted cover story in Science.

Source: TechCrunch


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @05:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @05:27AM (#625955)

    I think they have it right on... at those micrometer scales, my guess is that electrostatic fields around molecular bonding sites will be almost like neodymium magnets in our space frame.

    Design your bonding sites around molecular structures, whose dimensions are predicated by the atoms themselves, ( which come in a little over 100 varieties, only maybe 20 are commonly used - and each comes only in one extremely precisely defined size - and each have properties so consistently precise that they are used to build atomic clocks ) and you can design extremely precisely positioned snap-points in 3D-space.

    Now, you put your "parts" in a bin, shake, and they "magically" snap in place, each seeking its partner who has a correspondingly mating set of snap points.

    Its Tetris to the next level.

    ( Isn't the construction of life the damndest piece of work you've ever seen? Doncha wonder who designed it? )