Tethered subunits prepare the way to seriously hacking the ribosome
Foresight Update 28.08—August 13, 2015
ISSN 1078-9731
Nanotech News
Discuss these news stories at http://foresight.org/nanodot.
In this issue:
Engineering Nature’s primordial molecular machine—the ribosome—promises a path to unnatural polymers that may expand the set of properties provided by proteins and biomimetic polymers to engineer artificial molecular machine systems. …
Scaffolded DNA origami, one of the mainstays of structural DNA nanotechnology since its invention in 2006, continues to undergo improvement. … Taking this research together with yesterday’s post, it is gratifying to see that both DNA bricks and scaffolded DNA origami, two alternative implementations of structural DNA nanotechnology, are advancing rapidly. …
The idea of using a DNA framework as a “nanobreadboard” to prototype various nanoscale circuits and device arrays goes back at least to Paul Rothemund’s 2006 invention of scaffolded DNA origami technology. The idea played a central role in the development of the concept of modular molecular composite nanosystems formulated as part of the 2007 Foresight and Battelle Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. Earlier this year researchers at Boise State University in Idaho published an open access article in the journal ACS Photonics “Excitonic AND Logic Gates on DNA Brick Nanobreadboards”. However, instead of scaffolded DNA origami, these researchers built their nanobreadboards using an alternate form of structural DNA nanotechnology …
Not only does structural DNA nanotechnology work in non-aqueous solvents, but in some ways it may work best in non-aqueous solvents. …
… Biotechnology and nanotechnology are increasingly playing synergistic roles in opening new opportunities for near-term medical advances, as we try to indicate here with posts on Future Medicine and Nanomedicine. A crucial factor in obtaining the benefits of these research advances is how quickly and efficiently discoveries can move from the laboratory bench to the market. Whether the technology is biotechnology, nanotechnology, or the interface of the two, the basic issues of founding and funding a startup are probably not all that different. And what better place to explore those issues than Foresight’s location in the heart of Silicon Valley! …
The 1999 Foresight Institute Distinguished Student—Anita Goel, at that time an MD/PhD candidate at the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and also a PhD candidate at Harvard’s Physics Department—went on to found Nanobiosym to integrate physics, nanotechnology, and biomedicine. Two years ago Nanobiosym’s Gene-RADAR® sensing technology won the first competition of the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE …
To Foresight friends,
We’re pleased to announce that the SENS Research Foundation is once again hosting its Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference here in Silicon Valley. The Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference is designed to bring together a global community to transform the treatment of age-related disease, and they would like all of us to be there. …
… Prof. Puglisi began with the observation that one of the triumphs of the application of chemistry and physics to biology has been the field of structural biology, his department at Stanford. Three of the last six Nobel Prizes in Chemistry have been given for determining, using primarily X-ray diffraction methods, the three-dimensional position of atoms in key molecules that drive biological function. The example that he focused upon is the ribosome—the macromolecular machine that synthesizes proteins from the genetic code. He noted, however, that one of the problems not addressed in these studies is that the pictures are static snapshots. …
—Nanodot posts by James Lewis
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