Posts tagged as:

nanosystems

The Molecular Machine Path
to Molecular Manufacturing (2):
Exploiting Improved Methods and Building Blocks

December 27, 2009

Part 4 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

Rigid, structurally diverse bis-peptide oligomers C. Schafmeister, JACS, 2006

In this post, I’d like to outline the promise of fabrication technologies that are within reach of [...]

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How to make carbon nanotubes
at room temperature

November 15, 2009

As I noted in a recent post on self-assembled nanoelectronics (“Carbon Nanotube Transistors through DNA Origami”), carbon nanotubes (CNTs) hold promise for self-assembled nanomechanical systems, too: They are orders of magnitude stiffer than biomolecules, and can serve not only as rigid components, but also as low-friction linear and rotary bearings to support moving parts.
Recent [...]

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My MIT dissertation — a draft of Nanosystems —
is now online

September 26, 2009

My MIT doctoral dissertation, “Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation”, is a draft of Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, and MIT has now made it available as a 30 MB pdf. You can download it here.
The Nanosystems project began as notes for a seminar that I taught at Stanford, grew toward a [...]

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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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Slides for Berkeley Talk
on Molecular Nanosystems

May 6, 2009

Framework-directed self assembly
I’ve now posted the slides for my Berkeley talk on objectives and experimental directions in biomolecular/inorganic composite nanosystems: Click here to download.
The talk was a keynote at the 2009 Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum.
I’ve described some of the concepts and motivations in an earlier post, and this technology direction is also discussed in the report [...]

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Macromolecular Modeling
for Molecular Systems Engineering

April 16, 2009

Nir London of the Macromolecular Modeling Blog has invited me to offer my perspective on the field. After patiently waiting for me to complete it, he’s posted the resulting essay, which I have cross-posted below.
The Macromolecular Modeling Blog is hosted by the Rosetta Design Group, which offers molecular modeling services based on the Rosetta protein [...]

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Nanosystems for Molecular Manufacturing

April 4, 2009

While upgrading parts of the E-drexler.com website, though, I’ve been re-reading some of the on-line content from Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, the book that grew into, then out of, my MIT dissertation. Nanosystems explores what physics tells us about the potential of advanced molecular manufacturing systems and products. It outlines some ideas about [...]

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Polyoxometalate Nanostructures

March 29, 2009

My technical talks often include a slide that shows several kinds of atomically precise components that may prove useful in composite nanosystems. One image is labeled “polyoxometalates”, a name that isn’t widely known. I think it should be.
Polyoxometalates (POMs) are molecular structures that are, in effect, atomically precise bits of metal oxide that contain [...]

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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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Peptoids at the Molecular Foundry

December 1, 2008

Last week, I visited Ron Zuckerman at the Molecular Foundry to talk science, meet Ron’s colleagues, and give a seminar on directions for research in molecular system-building. I learned a lot, and the seminar topic seemed to be on-target for the lab, drawing an audience that packed the seminar room.

Peptide

Peptoid
Roughly speaking, ‘R’ = ‘whatever…’

For [...]

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Nanoplasmonics

November 22, 2008

As discussed in a recent overview artlcle, optics meets nanotechnology in plasmonics, an emerging technology that exploits electromagnetic waves tightly coupled to metal surfaces.
Light can be coupled into and out of surface plasmons, in which free-space wavelengths of ~500 nm can be reduced by an order of magnitude and interact with waveguides, apertures, resonators (etc.) [...]

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Modular Molecular Composite Nanosystems

November 10, 2008

Framework-directed self assembly
Researchers have amassed a wonderful collection of functional, atomically precise components with potentially useful properties — optical, electronic, chemical, mechanical, and so on — but they haven’t been assembled to make complex, atomically precise nanosystems. I think of this as the “circuit-board problem”: Functional devices are small, simple, and may have interesting physics, [...]

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