What Do You Think?

[troach]

I can see such potential with this. from building machines that can actually cure cancer (attack and remove only cancer cells from the body) to being able to reconstruct damage to the body that would be impossible any other way. The potential for such good is mind boggling.

Unfortunately I can also see how some of the world leaderships are likely to use the same technology for military and extortion purposes. By programming the nano machines to destroy people literally from the inside out. Which means the potential for the darkest of evil uses is equally as mind boggling.

As an old saying goes, "With great power comes great responsibility". I pray that as we move forward with this and so many other sciences that the world is truly ready to take on those responsibilities.


copied from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11829347/ns/technology_and_science-science/

DNA folded into a world of patterns
Origami method could be used for nano-computers and more

By Alan Boyle
3/15/2006

A computer scientist has developed a method to weave stringy DNA molecules into nanometer-scale, two-dimensional patterns ranging from smiley faces to a map of the Americas.

Experts say the "DNA origami" procedure laid out by Paul Rothemund of the California Institute of Technology could be adapted to create nano-computers, new drug delivery systems or even molecular-scale chemical factories.

"We are arriving at a new frontier in our pursuit of ever-smaller structures," Lloyd Smith, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, where Rothemund's research was published.

In a news release, Rothemund said the process is so simple that high-school students should be able to design woven DNA patterns, but so versatile that scientists could build complex structures for a wide variety of nanotechnology applications.

"A physicist, for example, might attach nano-sized semiconductor 'quantum dots' in a pattern that creates a quantum computer," he said. "A biologist might use DNA origami to take proteins which normally occur separately in nature, and organize them into a multi-enzyme factory that hands a chemical product from one enzyme machine to the next in the manner of an assembly line."

Rothemund's technique uses chemicals to twist a long, single-stranded DNA molecule into a predetermined shape, then "staples" the scaffolding together with crossover strands. For the experiments reported in Nature, Rothemund used the genome from a bacteria-destroying virus called M13 — well-suited as weaving material because its 7,000-nucleotide sequence has been fully decoded.

An army of smileys

To demonstrate the technique's versatility, Rothemund created a variety of fanciful shapes, including stars, tilelike octagons that look like lace doilies, and squares of carpet with the letters "DNA," a double helix or the rough shapes of North and South America woven into it. The shapes range around 100 nanometers wide, about 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

Smith noted that the technique could allow for dyes or attachment points to be woven into the patterns. That could turn the origami patterns into "nano-breadboards" that would serve as the basis for molecular-scale circuitry.

Rothemund and other researchers are working to extend the 2-D origami technique to 3-D structures as well. If they're successful, that could lead to the development of 3-D molecular "cages" to hold enzymes or drug molecules. The tiny cages could be flipped open chemically when the material is needed.

Decades of research

Rothemund's work builds on decades of research into using DNA as a molecular-scale construction kit — a pursuit pioneered by New York University's Nadrian Seeman.

Seeman and his colleagues have been working with even smaller DNA structures in three dimensions, measuring mere nanometers in width rather than the tens of nanometers spanned by Rothemund's structures.

Seeman told MSNBC.com that he was enthusiastic about Rothemund's work because it adds another level of scale to nano-construction processes.

"On a slightly larger scale, he's added a huge amount of convenience, and there's something to be said for that," Seeman said. The two techniques both take a "bottom-up" approach to creating small-scale structures, but Rothemund's origami method "might ultimately be easier to interface with the top-down world than ours."

Seeman emphasized that a variety of methods on a variety of scales will come into play as researchers develop nanostructures — just as tweezers, pliers and pipe wrenches are all useful at larger scales.

[troach]

The above article was from 2006.

The Following was posted, April 13, 2011.

Can someone please explain how or why this person/group is being given credit for coming up a way to manipulate dna into various patterns?

Yes it is a cute story and has a nice romantic angle in a weird geek sort of way. But this process accomplishment seems sort of mundane compared to the earlier process.



copied from:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/04/11/6453231-wedding-rings-made-out-of-dna



'Wedding rings' made out of DNA

Alexander Heckel

The world's smallest wedding rings are built up from two interlocked strands of DNA.
By Alan Boyle


Thorsten Schmidt can now say he had a hand in creating the world's smallest wedding rings, measuring less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.


The interlocked rings, known as catenans (after the Latin word for "chain"), were made from looped strands of DNA and measure just 18 nanometers wide. The wedding angle comes about not only because of the rings' perfectly circular shape, but also because Schmidt got married while he was working on the experiment.


These rings aren't just a romantic gesture: Because they're freely pivotable, they could be useful components in nano-machines or molecular motors.


"We still have a long way to go before DNA structures such as the catenan can be used in everyday items," Professor Alexander Heckel, Schmidt's co-author and adviser at Germany's Goethe University Frankfurt, said in a news release, "but structures of DNA can, in the near future, be used to arranage and study proteins or other molecules that are too small for a direct manipulation, by means of auto-organization."


The experiment, reported in the journal Nano Letters, involved creating two C-shaped DNA fragments that were positioned with their open ends pointing away from each other. Polyamide bonds were attached to the DNA to anchor the fragments to each other, and then the researchers added an oligonucleotide to close each of the C-sections and form the rings. The operation was done with mere chemistry. No nanometer-sized tweezers were required.


The paper notes that the assemblages resemble "stylized wedding rings," and here's the icing on the cake: Schmidt, who is now at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, dedicated the paper "to his wife and colleague Dr. Diana P. Goncalves Schmidt on the occasion of their wedding."