Conceptual illustration of two DNA robots collecting and sorting cargoDEMIN LIU (WWW.MOLGRAPHICS.COM)Walking across a precisely folded DNA landscape, a teeny tiny robot picks up a molecular payload, drops it off at a defined delivery address, then heads off to retrieve and sort more molecules. This is not the opening scene of a new sci-fi movie, it’s the outcome of a very real bioengineering project reported today (September 14) in Science. What’s more, these robots find and sort the molecules without human micromanagement.
“The design of the robots is incredibly elegant. . . . It has great simplicity, but the robots can nevertheless do non-trivial things,” says computer scientist John Reif of Duke University who was not involved in the project. “This is beautiful research that has taken the field of DNA robotics to a new stage.”
DNA is a wonderful building material. So much is understood about this nucleic acid’s chemical and physical properties that it is possible to predict with great accuracy the folding and topography of a given nucleotide sequence and how it will bind through Watson and Crick base-pairing to other sequences. Indeed, researchers are busy designing and creating complex two- and three- dimensional DNA patterns and structures for a variety of potential applications.
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