Reviewing controlled motions in artificial molecular machines
Foresight Update 28.10—October 7, 2015
ISSN 1078-9731
Nanotech News
Discuss these news stories at http://foresight.org/nanodot.
In this issue:
DNA nanotechnology has been used to deliver to a cell, not just drug molecules, but an entire gene editing system. …
Our principal interest in DNA nanotechnology is based on using the easily coded molecular recognition properties of DNA to arrange molecules and other nanometer scale structures; however, DNA is also proving useful for arranging whole cells for a new branch of nanomedicine: the three-dimensional printing of human tissue. …
Visionary proposals for advanced medical nanorobots often picture µm scale submarine-like devices navigating the bloodstream. Those are probably still a couple decades away, but prototypes of conceptually much simpler six µm scale motors that could someday navigate the oceans to sequester carbon dioxide have been demonstrated. …
Even without a general method for high throughput atomically precise manufacturing, atomic precision in nanotechnology is proving increasingly useful across a range of technologies. One recent example is the atomically controlled boron-doping of graphene nanoribbons. …
Frequently we report here the use of DNA origami, a large subset of DNA nanotechnology, as a way to build and organize increasingly complex nanostructures, both to advance specific current applications and to build a path toward atomic precision in manufacturing. Despite the impressive track record of this technology, there may be opportunities to substantially improve it, as reported recently at Phys.org …
Two weeks ago, a post about a recent overview of molecular machines included this reference:
One of the earliest reviews of artificial molecular machines, and arguably the most comprehensive, titled “Synthetic Molecular Motors and Mechanical Machines” … was published in December 2006, written by Prof. Leigh in collaboration with Euan R. Kay and Francesco Zerbetto, …
A few days after that post, Prof. Leigh and current colleagues Sundus Erbas-Cakmak, Charlie T. McTernan, and Alina L. Nussbaumer published … an updated and comparably comprehensive review titled “Artificial Molecular Machines” …
Alex Wissner-Gross, presented “Bringing Computational Programmability to Nanostructured Surfaces” as an effort to close the feedback loop between bits and atoms. … Dr. Wissner-Gross observed that, looking at the past few decades, the progress on the “bits” side of technology has been unrelenting, and that it is incumbent upon nanotechnologists to make sure that the atoms side of the story is equally compelling. …
The artificial molecular machines overview we pointed to last week included several significant recent developments that we had missed, including this about molecular machines organized within a metal-organic framework, from the research group of 2007 Foresight Feynman Prize winner for the Experimental category J. Fraser Stoddart and his collaborators. Two months ago we described here a similar advance by a Canadian group immobilizing a molecular shuttle in a metal organic framework. The difference in the approach taken by the Loeb research group at the University of Windsor and the Stoddart research group at Northwestern University and their collaborators is very nicely explained in an article by Heather Zeiger at phys.org …
—Nanodot posts by James Lewis
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