Electron tunneling drives a conformational change in each wheel of a four-wheel drive, single molecule nanocar, driving it across a copper surface.
The oscillating synthesis and degradation of regulatory RNA molecules was used to produce a molecular clock to control the opening and closing of a DNA tweezers, and also to control the production of another RNA molecule to alter the fluorescence of a dye molecule.
Yarn woven from carbon nanotubes provides a thousand times more rotation than is obtained from other artificial muscles, and could be made into motors to provide propulsion for micrometer-sized medical nanorobots.
Varying the length of the DNA used to connect the nanoparticles provides for a wide variety of nanoparticle sizes and crystal symmetries.
This contribution has been forwarded by Ivo Rivetta. Researchers at UC Berkeley have taken a bioinspired approach to control the nanostructure of deposited thin films. In living organisms, the orientation of collagen in tissue determines its properties: For instance, a number of blue-skinned animals, including the mandrill monkey, derive their coloring not from pigment, but… Continue reading Viruses guide nano-assembly of biomaterials
Tiles made from DNA helices have been made to self-assemble into a more complex structure, which then was used to seed the formation of a complementary structure. This second structure in turn seeded the formation of multiple copies of the first structure.
A complex piece of DNA that acts as a biological computer when it is inserted into cells determines whether or not the cell is a specific type of cancer cell, and if so, initiates the suicide of that cell.
Christopher William Ince Jr. writes about a new insight into how nanotubes grow, which may lead to even more useful technological applications for these nanostructures: Physicists Zhifeng Ren and Hengzhi Wang of Boston College have discovered two initial stages of carbon nanotube growth previously obscured during the growth process. What the researches found is that… Continue reading Boston College Researches Uncover Early Phases of Carbon Nanotube Growth
An algorithm helps design peptides that will self-assemble on a given surface to produce a supramolecular structure of desired geometry.
Growing heart cells in a scaffold containing gold nanowires produces a tissue patch that is thicker and in which the cells beat synchronously as they do in healthy heart tissue.
