Researchers at universities in New York and Ningbo, China, say they have created tiny robots built from DNA that can reproduce themselves.
The tiny mechanism is so small that 1,000 of them could fit into the width of a sheet of paper.
“Nanoscale industrial robots have potential as manufacturing platforms and are capable of automatically performing repetitive tasks to handle and produce nanomaterials with consistent precision and accuracy,” said Feng Zhou, a lead researcher on the project and staff member at New York University’s Department of Physics and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Zhou said the 100-nanometer-wide mechanisms manipulate different parts of DNA strands and properly align them so they can be “welded” together and then move on to the next step. They devised a novel means of folding DNA in three dimensions that allows for limitless self-replication.
Prior research into DNA robotics was limited to 2D construction.
2023-12-08 02:41:03
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