Phil Dooley
Cosmos Magazine
Scientists have built a tiny robot from strands of DNA and devised a way to remote-control it using magnetic fields.
The team from Ohio State University in the US envisage these robots being deployed into human bodies to perform controlled medical procedures such as delivering a drug to a tumour.
"There's a growing interest in interacting with a molecular system in real time," says Carlos Castro, lead author of the team's paper, published in the journal Nature Communications.
"You could do it with a joystick, as if you might be playing a video game."
Castro's team has been perfecting a technique known as 'DNA origami' to assemble strands of DNA into tiny machines. To date they've made levers, rotating parts and sliding joints, even a vehicle to deliver a cancer drug into a leukaemia cell.
So far scientists have designed these machines - including a two-legged DNA robot that walked along a DNA strand sorting molecules - to be triggered by changes in solution or when encountering a specific protein.
But Castro wanted to find a way to control the robots interactively. He teamed up with physicist Ratnasingham Sooryakumar, a colleague at Ohio State University and specialist in magnetic control protocols. Together they devised the system, but it took four years to bring it to reality.
Read more
Cosmos Magazine
Scientists have built a tiny robot from strands of DNA and devised a way to remote-control it using magnetic fields.
The team from Ohio State University in the US envisage these robots being deployed into human bodies to perform controlled medical procedures such as delivering a drug to a tumour.
"There's a growing interest in interacting with a molecular system in real time," says Carlos Castro, lead author of the team's paper, published in the journal Nature Communications.
"You could do it with a joystick, as if you might be playing a video game."
Castro's team has been perfecting a technique known as 'DNA origami' to assemble strands of DNA into tiny machines. To date they've made levers, rotating parts and sliding joints, even a vehicle to deliver a cancer drug into a leukaemia cell.
So far scientists have designed these machines - including a two-legged DNA robot that walked along a DNA strand sorting molecules - to be triggered by changes in solution or when encountering a specific protein.
But Castro wanted to find a way to control the robots interactively. He teamed up with physicist Ratnasingham Sooryakumar, a colleague at Ohio State University and specialist in magnetic control protocols. Together they devised the system, but it took four years to bring it to reality.
Read more
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