Posts tagged as:

DNA

Carbon Nanotubes in Ordered DNA Wrappers

July 12, 2009

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNs) are well known for their outstanding strength, stiffness, and electronic properties, but their utility has been limited by the diversity of their structures and the difficulty of separating different kinds. In a new paper in Nature, a DuPont group reports the development of a new method for separation, one that also [...]

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A Third Revolution in DNA Nanotechnology

May 22, 2009

In a new paper, Shawn Douglas and his colleagues at William Shih’s lab have demonstrated the first systematic method for building multilayer 3D nanostructures of DNA. In his commentary, Tom LaBean calls this “a third revolution in DNA nanotechnology”, following Seeman’s launch of the field and Rothemund’s development of the breakthrough origami technique.
In the authors’ [...]

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A DNA Origami Box

May 10, 2009

A paper in the current issue of Nature reports the fabrication of DNA origami boxes ~35 nm on a side; to my knowledge, these are the first closed structures made by these means.
Paul Rothemund’s initial 2006 Nature article [pdf] described a methodical way to form patterns of raised features on origami, based on a raster [...]

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CAD for Nanoengineering: DNA, proteins, and search-intensive design

March 11, 2009

In my previous post I discussed some basic design concerns that arise with atomically precise structures, and focused on materials having crystalline order. However, the ability to make structures like these is now extremely limited. Because they can’t yet be built systematically from smaller building blocks, structures of this general are more likely to be [...]

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Toward Affordable Structural DNA Nanotechnology

February 4, 2009

Science recently reported a research advance linked to a series of topics I’ve covered:

Self-assembled systems
George Church’s roadmap for radically lowering the cost of DNA
Structural DNA nanotechnology for modular molecular composite nanosystems
Cryo-electron microscopy for visualizing large self-assembled structures

The advance is an improved structural map of the core of the self-assembled protein machinery that some bacteria use [...]

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Productive Nanosystems: The Movies

January 30, 2009

In his comment on Molecular Machine Assembly: The Movie, Drew Whitehouse reminded me of a set of excellent animations of biological productive nanosystems, work done by Drew Berry. These videos are based on scientific data describing molecular structure and function, and from what I’ve seen, Drew Berry’s work is the best of its kind. Below [...]

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Toward Advanced Nanotechnology:

Nanomaterials (2)

January 16, 2009

As every mechanical engineer knows, the stiffness of a material — its elastic modulus — is often a critical property; likewise in nanomechanical engineering, though in part for a different reason. I’d like to say a few words about this, then discuss some materials of interest in implementing nanosystems. And there is something I must [...]

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Low-Cost DNA Production Roadmap

December 21, 2008

Synthetic DNA today costs millions of dollars per kilogram, but Harvard‘s George Church has proposed an approach that could drop the cost by many orders of magnitude. This could greatly expand applications of structural DNA nanotechnology.

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A DNA-Imaging Bottleneck

December 4, 2008

The Battelle-led roadmap, my recent talks, and Nanorex (the molecular-CAD company I’ve been advising) all emphasize structural DNA nanotechnology as a basis for developing large, complex, easily reconfigured frameworks for building composite nanosystems. This gives me a strong interest in the difficulties that hamper SDN research.

AFM images of flat DNA structures

“Folding DNA to create nanoscale [...]

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