DNA on the move
Nanobot ‘spiders’ learn how to walk
Deep inside a beaker in a humming chemistry lab in New York City, a spindly spider crawls over a jumble of origami. It’s not the colored-paper kind of origami, but rather is made of precisely designed segments of DNA. For that matter, so is the spider.
This spider wasn’t built to spin webs or eat bugs. It’s a DNA nanorobot, a primitive version of the machines that may someday perform tasks too small for humans to do.
For more than a decade, scientists have been developing DNA nanomachines, from tiny tweezers to two-legged “walkers” that can step to the left or right. Recent molecular robot research has gone a step further, aiming to get DNA molecules to organize themselves and move about, all without batteries or information storage in their nanobodies. These machines harness the power of natural DNA-DNA interactions programmed into the origami foundation.