DNA on the move
Nanobot ‘spiders’ learn how to walk
Deep inside a beaker in a humming chemistry lab in New York City, a spindly spider crawls over a jumble of origami. It’s not the colored-paper kind of origami, but rather is made of precisely designed segments of DNA. For that matter, so is the spider.
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This spider wasn’t built to spin webs or eat bugs. It’s a DNA nanorobot, a primitive version of the machines that may someday perform tasks too small for humans to do.
For more than a decade, scientists have been developing DNA nanomachines, from tiny tweezers to two-legged “walkers” that can step to the left or right. Recent molecular robot research has gone a step further, aiming to get DNA molecules to organize themselves and move about, all without batteries or information storage in their nanobodies. These machines harness the power of natural DNA-DNA interactions programmed into the origami foundation.