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DNA Assembled Nano-Transistors
Bob Vila's Hammer writes "In an article at New Scientist, researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have harnessed DNA to mold a nano-transister constructed of graphite nanotubes coated in silver and gold. The carbon nanotube assembly when completed is a fully working transistor when voltage is applied. The process is ingenious, using proteins from E. Coli bacterium to bind carbon nanotubes to certain sites on strands of DNA. Then graphite nanotubes coated with antibodies connect to the proteins. Finally, silver ions are added to the solution which chemically bond with the DNA site where the protein is attached. Further refinement of the technique is required before full scale production would be efficient, but this could allow the creation of elaborate self-assembling DNA sculptures and circuitry."
This process was first performed at MIT by Angela Belcher. She was using engineered viruses that coated themselves with semiconductor materiel to produce nanoscale FET trasnsitors a billionth of a meter in size. You can read more in the November issue of IEEE Spectrum.
So what's next DNA assembled WiFi device inside of our brain effectively using it as a "mobile" storage medium? Probably not only that, but also for doing true multi-task administration in the real world scope.
:)
Just think how quickly one could hack wireless access points around them or a beowolf cluster of brain activity via peer-to-peer. That should rack up some SETI@Home work units completed in no time!
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Great... Now when the compter blows up, I'll get dysentery.
Will the new computers built of this material be more suceptable to virus attack!
For problems, seek only the simplest solution, complexity brings with it more problems.
I can just the future.
"Humanity wiped out by terrible strain of life threatenning virus -- but it makes great video cards."
Finally a use for the moon. A clean room.
Could you imagine getting sick and having to sign an NDA and non contagion agreement?
What is the life expectancy of the components? From the article it seems to me (disclaimer: IANAMolecularBiologistOrNanoEngineer) that the organic component is not required after the "wires" are in place but will the DNA auto-repair any damage to the wire?
Couldn't a virus (biological, not computer) be used to re-write the DNA strand that is used to construct the devices, to make different components for sinister purposes?
Is it paranoia if they really are out to get you?
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Further refinement of the technique is required before full scale production would be efficient
/. include some sentence like this. I'm sortof patting myself on the back here when I say this, but hats off to the chemical engineers who actually do the work here. Chemical engineers are an important stepping stone between "oh, cool" and full-scale production, but hardly ever get a mention. In fact, most people have no idea what chemical engineers do, even though you probably scarcely have an item around you that doesn't owe its existence in part to chemical engineering.
It seems like a lot of the "science with potentially awesome applications" posts that get made to
A better process would be to adapt the proteosynthesis process for creating micro-polypeptide clusters that are circuit elements with highly specific binding sites for self assembly. A DNA sequence would encode an mRNA sequence that is passed to a ribsome-like micro-factory. An alphabet of tRNA units would carry heavily modified amino-acids and provide both the electrical and structural of properties of the polypeptide. Different polypetides might make transistors, autonomous clock circuits, chemical-to-electrical battery subunits, wires, tees, etc.
Part of the DNA sequence would encode binding sites that are highly specific. Each electrical component would have a unique code on each terminal that only binds with the component that it connects to in the circuit. By labelling all the terminii of the components with these specific binging patterns, you the potential for self-assembly. To make a complex circuit, you make separate batches of each component, then mix the batches together and they self-assemble into the circuits. Thus, a soup of appropriately labeled transistors and wires would self-assemble into a soup of full-adder circuits.
The use of larger-scale binding sites would enable hierarchical self-assembly of self-assembled micro-components (e.g., a soup of 1-bit full-adder circuits might self-assemble into a 8-bit full-adders, or 8-bit full-adders might bind to a gated accumulator registers, etc.)
I doubt this technology would let you create a 64-bit processor - the binding-site combinatorics get too ugly. But it might let you create RAM, RFID circuits, or small CPUs (e.g., the Intel 8080 only needs 6000 transistors)
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