A team of bioengineers from the California Institute of Technology (USA) has created a DNA nanorobot with one hand and two feet: the hand is used to pick up molecules and the two feet to guide them to the desired place, step by step. The innovative robot is made from a single strand of DNA and is capable of autonomous walking. One of its potential applications in the future could be to operate inside the human body. The conclusions have been published in the journal Science.
This molecular machine that works at the nano-scale is a bit slow at the moment, since it takes 5 minutes to take a small step of 6 nanometers, but over time its creators hope to be able to accelerate its speed and improve, therefore, its performance.
This nanorobot could assemble chemical compounds or reorganize nanoparticles into circuits for the future.
“Just like electromechanical robots can be sent to far away places, like Mars, we would like to send these molecular robots to tiny places where humans cannot travel, like the bloodstream. Specifically, our goal was to design and build this nanorobot to perform a sophisticated task: ordering a shipment (molecules in this case) “, explains Lulu Qian, co-author of the work.
To assemble this little robot, the experts built three pieces: first, a kind of leg with two feet to walk, an arm with a kind of hand to pick up the load and, finally, a portion that recognizes a specific point where to leave it. All this with just a few nucleotides from a single strand of DNA.
According to experts, this is just a model. Robots with multiple arms and hands could be created to transport many molecules at once, for example. But, for now, the nanorobot has been able to explore a molecular surface and pick up two different types of molecules (two-color fluorescent pink and yellow) and distribute them in different areas.
Thanks to the fluorescent molecules, the scientists found that, indeed, the 6 molecules ended up in the correct zone in 24 hours. By putting more nanorobots to work, the result was just as effective but in less time. The probability of each robot to finish the task correctly was 80%.
“Although we have developed this robot for a specific task, the same system design can be generalized to operate with dozens of types of charges located at any arbitrary starting location on the surface and one could also have multitudes of robots performing various tasks in parallel. classification “, clarifies Anupama Thubagere, co-author of the work.
The researchers argue that the time it takes for robots to deliver their cargo could be greatly shortened if single-stranded ‘tails’ were also attached to them, or by using motor proteins programmed with DNA. This is only the beginning, since the design of the nanomachine is very simple and, in addition, with very little consumption of chemical energy .
Reference: AJ Thubagere el al., “In charge-sorting DNA robot,” Science (2017). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi… 1126 / science.aan6558
