Researchers create 3D DNA nanorobots

Researchers at the Universities of New York and Ningbo, China, claim to have created tiny robots built from DNA that can reproduce.

Such nanorobots could one day launch search-and-destroy missions against cancer cells in human blood without requiring surgery or collecting toxic waste from the ocean.

The tiny mechanism is so small that 1,000 of them could fit within the width of a sheet of paper.

“Nanoscale industrial robots have potential as manufacturing platforms and are capable of automatically performing repetitive tasks to manipulate and produce nanomaterials with consistent precision and accuracy,” said Feng Zhou, principal investigator of the project and staff member of the Department of Physics and Physics at New York University. the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Zhou said the 100-nanometer-wide mechanisms manipulate different parts of the DNA strands and align them correctly so they can be “welded” together and then move on to the next step. They designed a new way to fold DNA in three dimensions, allowing unlimited self-replication.

Previous research on DNA robotics was limited to 2D construction.

“Our introduction of precise multi-axis folding and positioning as a tool/technology for nanofabrication will open the door to more complex and useful nano- and microdevices,” Zhou said.

In an interview with NewScientist, Andrew Surman, a chemistry professor specializing in nanomaterials, said: “Putting this stuff together is tricky…The way things are folded, both in the synthetic things we make and in the biomolecules, is really important. are badly folded, they do not work.

Zhou said his team’s work builds on four decades of progress in the field of DNA nanotechnology. He noted a host of innovative inventions, including machines, enzymes, self-replicators, computers, and nucleic acid “walkers”—applications involving nanomedicine, diagnostic detection of biological samples, and nanorobotics.

“Our demonstration portends programmable, light- and heat-controlled nanomachines and robots for nanoscale production of nanoscale biocompatible structures and devices,” he said.

Richard Handy of the University of Plymouth, England, who was not involved in the study, observed: “This would be a way of adding an enzyme or protein to a cell without requiring the DNA of the cell needs to make it. who have genetic deficiencies that prevent them from making an enzyme, so this could be a therapy that would build the enzyme in the tissues for them. If you have a lot of people with type 2 diabetes and problems with insulin secretion, maybe you can get one of these DNA scaffolds to make insulin. »

Science fiction has tackled the development of nanotechnological devices, sometimes in apocalyptic stories.

E. Eric Drexler, a pioneer in nanotechnology research, imagined a nightmare scenario in his 1986 book “Engines of Creation.”

“Imagine such a replicator floating in a bottle of chemicals, making copies of itself,” he said. “The first replicator assembles one copy in a thousand seconds, the two replicators then build two more in the next thousand seconds, the four build four more, and the eight build eight more. After ten hours, there are no not thirty-six new replicators, but more than 68 billion. In less than a day, they would weigh a ton; in less than two days, they would overtake the Earth.

He coined the now famous term “gray matter” which refers to the catastrophic replication of nanobots that ultimately consume all biomass.

Zhou’s report, “Towards three-dimensional industrial DNA nanorobots,” appears in Scientific robotics.

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