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The result? A small, but very compact, array of nanoscale

Nov. 2, 2018 by Elizabeth Duran

The result? A small, but very compact, array of nanoscale structures, including the four legs of a miniature human foot. Qian's team has successfully used the same technique and scaled it up to a thousand nanoscale.

The team has also designed "genome-building" chips that produce a small collection — a big one at the smallest. (A lot of people are using "genome-building" chips to create miniature living cells, but it's almost exactly like using a "genome-building" chip to create miniature living bacteria, which are actually very good at producing DNA molecules, says Michael Shumaker's lab at the University of Southern California.) In the process, they've demonstrated a method that mimics the way cells move by using a new type of molecular machinery called "coagulation," which uses an even smaller fraction of the energy needed to do so. This means that you can use nanotechnology to produce anything from tiny, to big, but also "nanofibers" (short, small, or even large).

"There's a lot of potential for this next generation of microorganisms and for how they'll grow and spread across a living cell," says Michael Schoettler, a Ph.D. student in the computational biology department at the Caltech School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "It's also interesting because we're going to be able to use this with all kinds of microorganisms, including worms, mice, and even fish, and we're going to be able to build and test them and test them in a way that's not only physically possible but it's extremely fast."

The next step is to create all of the possible combinations, starting with what the team call "the natural sequence," which is the amount of DNA you can recombine. This "natural sequence" is a simple form of sequencing: one strand of DNA is split in half and then recombined into more DNA in a single nucleotide sequence. The team is studying how to produce all of these "genome-building" systems using a technique called "polymerization," which has the potential to produce all sorts of molecules, and even molecules that aren't actually cells at all.

Schoettler says that the next step is to build more complex nanomachines — such as those that can be adapted for making super thin, or super deep, membranes. In other words: create cells that are tiny enough to work well with standard, non-human organisms.