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- The first motors made of DNA, the vehicle of inheritance,
are unveiled today by an Anglo-American team of scientists.
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- The DNA motors, which resemble tweezers closing and opening,
are 100,000 times smaller than the head of a pin. The techniques used to
make them may pave the way to electronic circuits 1,000 times more powerful
than today's silicon chips, says the team from Bell Labs and the University
of Oxford.
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- The motors are self-sufficient and do not require other
chemicals to operate. The attraction of using DNA for molecular construction
is two-fold: the "letters" of DNA carry information; and a single
strand of DNA will stick firmly to another only if their sequences of letters
match up.
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- "We took advantage of how pieces of DNA - with its
billions of possible variations - can precisely match up with each other
to form complete DNA molecules," said the Bell Labs physicist Dr Bernard
Yurke, who leads the research team that reports the advance today in the
journal Nature.
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- The DNA motors self-assemble in a test-tube because the
team designed pieces of synthetic DNA that would recognise each other at
different parts of the process, including the closing and opening stages.
Dr Yurke said: "This may lead to a test-tube based nanofabrication
technology that assembles complex structures, such as circuits, through
the orderly addition of molecules."
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- The team is experimenting with ways to attach DNA to
electrically conducting molecules to assemble molecular-scale electronic
circuits.
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