A group of scientist from the University of Michigan have turned to the world of biology in an attempt to overcome some of the hurdles encountered with assembling nanoparticles. They believe they have developed a way to trap nonoparticles in cages of DNA which have the potential to create self-assembling nanostructures such as "transistors, metamaterials and even tiny robots."
Sound too good to be true? Well they haven't actually done it yet. However, if the chemical and mathematical models work as predicted, they should be able to feed a design into a computer which will then generate the cage type and DNA sequence needed for the structure to self-assemble.
I'm extremely interested in how biology can be used in an engineering context to develop much more sophisticated technologies than we have today. It seems that we humans, as inventers can learn a lot from the systems that evolution has taken billions of years to develop. And while it's a bit tenuous to say that the way DNA is used in the construction of nanostructures is similar to the way that organisms use it. It is however somewhat eerie that the instructions for the self-assembling nanorobots of the future might be encoded in DNA sequences.
Pictures:
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2699/26994801.jpg
http://lamp.tu-graz.ac.at/~hadley/nanoscience/nanosub/nanosub.html
10.1103/PhysRevE.79.011404
References:
10.1103/PhysRevE.79.011404
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126994.800-dna-cages-could-help-nanoparticles-selfassemble.html
