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MrPlow writes:

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Researchers have devised a magnetic control system to make tiny DNA-based robots move on demand -- and much faster than recently possible.

In the journal Nature Communications, Carlos Castro and Ratnasingham Sooryakumar and their colleagues from The Ohio State University report that the control system reduced the response time of prototype nano-robot components from several minutes to less than a second.

[...] "Real-time manipulation methods like our magnetic approach enable the possibility for scientists to interact with DNA nano-devices, and in turn interact with molecules and molecular systems that could be coupled to those nano-devices in real-time with direct visual feedback."

In earlier work, Castro's team used a technique called DNA origami to fold individual strands of DNA to form simple microscopic tools like rotors and hinges. They even built a "Trojan horse" out of DNA for delivering drugs to cancer cells. For this new study, the researchers joined with Ratnasingham Sooryakumar, professor of physics. He previously developed microscopic magnetic "tweezers" for moving biological cells in biomedical applications such as gene therapy. The tweezers were actually made of groups of magnetic particles that moved in sync to nudge the cells where people wanted them to go.

Those magnetic particles, while invisible to the naked eye, were still many times bigger than one of Castro's nano-machines, Sooryakumar explained.

"We had discovered a way to harness the power of magnetic forces to probe the microscopic world -- a hidden world of astounding complexity," he said. "But we wanted to transition from the micro-world to the nano-world. This led to the collaboration with Dr. Castro. The challenges were to shrink the functionality of our particles a thousand-fold, couple them to precise locations on the moving parts of the machines and incorporate fluorescent molecules as beacons to monitor the machines as they moved."

Source: https://news.osu.edu/news/2018/06/01/dna-robots/

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