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Nanotechnology

Molecular robots on the move

Nature volume 465, pages 167–168 (2010)Cite this article

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Robots have to store lots of information in order to coordinate their actions, but how can this be done for nanometre-scale robots? One answer is to program data into the robots' environment instead.

Both papers trace their origins to the field of DNA computing, which began in 1994 with Leonard Adleman's seminal paper3 describing the use of DNA molecules to solve a small example of the travelling-salesman problem — a task that involves calculating the shortest possible route between several locations, visiting each location only once. Since then, DNA computing has slowly morphed into the field of DNA nanotechnology, in which increasingly complex and sophisticated examples of DNA-based nanostructures are imbued with various logical, chemical and physical properties.

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Figure 1: Nanomachines in science fiction.

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  1. Lloyd M. Smith is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA. smith@chem.wisc.edu,

    Lloyd M. Smith

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  1. Lloyd M. Smith
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Smith, L. Molecular robots on the move. Nature 465, 167–168 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/465167a

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