Posts tagged as:

SDN

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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The Molecular Machine Path
to Molecular Manufacturing (1):
Foldamers and Brownian Assembly

December 25, 2009

Part 3 of a series prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

Lathe, 1911 A machine tool, used to make machines

In my view, the most attractive way forward in developing advanced molecular machine systems is by exploiting the molecular machine systems that are available today. Historically, [...]

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News, nucleic acid edition

September 11, 2009

I’ve been working on deadline and expect to be writing here more regularly soon. Here are a few recent nanotechnology news items of note, all involving nucleic acids:

 

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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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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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Motors, Brownian Motors,
and Brownian Mechanosynthesis

April 11, 2009

I read a new paper today titled “A Bipedal DNA Brownian Motor with Coordinated Legs”, but I find that this has prompted me to write not about what is new there — an advance in mechanical DNA nanotechnologies that is related to purely-DNA-based logic circuits — but instead about motors, Brownian motors, and their relationship [...]

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3D Imaging & Research Opportunity [updated]

December 19, 2008

About the sample preparation techniques I described in an earlier post, Paul Rothemund writes to say
Those picture are neat; as far as I know, no one has done freeze fracture / freeze-etch electron microscopy [of DNA nanostructures]. That is a gap, certainly….
A study of the effects of critical point drying or freeze drying/sublimation on DNA [...]

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3D imaging of biological nanostructures

December 15, 2008

Deep-etch image of cytoskeleton, with origami inset (upper left)

“Three-dimensional reconstruction of the membrane skeleton at the plasma membrane interface by electron tomography” N Morone et al. JCB, 174:6, 851–862 (2006).

(Inset) “Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns”
PWK Rothemund,Nature, 440:297–302 (2006). [pdf]

In an earlier post I mentioned that researchers have been hampered by difficulties with [...]

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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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