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Science Technology

DNA Assembled Nano-Transistors 124

Posted by CowboyNeal from the self-building-parts dept.
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."
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DNA Assembled Nano-Transistors More

DNA Assembled Nano-Transistors

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  • Pretty good. (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by bl1st3r ( 464353 )
    I, for one, welcome our new nano-sized overlords.

  • Nothing New Here, Move Along (Score:4, Informative)

    by thelizman ( 304517 ) <hammerattack@yah ... com minus distro> on Friday November 21, 2003 @09:00AM (#7527361) Homepage
    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.

  • Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TypoNAM ( 695420 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @09:04AM (#7527382)
    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! :)
    • Go watch Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It'll help chill some of the glee with which you seem to look forward to networked brains. I know, I know, you were being sarcastic... sorry.
      • The Ghost in the Shell 2 manga goes into this in more detail. One of plot points is that a xenotransplant facility where pigs are grown as replacemnet organs (for humans), is hacked into, and the pigs brains are modified (to almost human inteligence) and then clustered together to make a new supercomputer.
    • Sounds alot like Borg technology to me. All you're lacking at that point is the code to add to our DNA sequences that will produce the "tubules" injectors so we can infect and assimilate our friends and family. I know I can't wait.

  • E. Coli Safety (Score:5, Funny)

    by dollar70 ( 598384 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @09:07AM (#7527390) Homepage Journal
    The process is ingenious, using proteins from E. Coli bacterium...

    Great... Now when the compter blows up, I'll get dysentery.

    • will overclocking cause explosive diarrhea?
    • Like so many other things in life, this situation can be summarized by a Simpson's sound byte [rpi.edu].
    • Sorry to be a bit pedantic but this could only if the developers are stupid enough to have used one of the rarer virulent strains. Moreover the bacteria would need to be still viable after the explosion (Escherichia coli are not well adapted to surviving extreme temperature and pressures).

      Factiod of the day: there are millions (billions?) of E.coli bacteria living in the intestines of each and every one of us right now and doing no harm whatsoever. It is just a few of their bretheren are giving the rest a
      • I think it was an attempt at humour, but thanks for setting the record straight. Now I, the author, and all affected slashdotters can get a good night's sleep.

        You are truly a king among men.

        -m
    • I can see the tabloid headlines now.
      I caught stomach flu from my computer, and I puked up this neat mini TV!

  • The real worry here is... (Score:4, Funny)

    by keoghp ( 457883 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @09:10AM (#7527401)
    Will the new computers built of this material be more suceptable to virus attack!

  • Nothing New - Faraday (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Michael Faraday did this years ago (use google). The only thing these guys brought to the table is the capacitance reactivity factor is about 43% of the original magnitude of Faraday's experiments.

    As a scientist in this field, I can say that this technology is still pretty wild and untested. You won't see anything come out of this for at least a decade, and even then, it probably won't get any further than Faraday's original result (he was eaten by a bio-thermo-electrolitic legume, aka a synthetic bean).

  • cool (Score:2, Funny)

    by s0m3body ( 659892 )
    this will put phrase 'my computer has died' into a completely new light ;-)

  • Future Virus's (Score:4, Funny)

    by Linus Sixpack ( 709619 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @09:16AM (#7527430) Journal
    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?

  • Just a couple of things ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by the real darkskye ( 723822 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @09:19AM (#7527443) Homepage
    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?
    • The DNA is used to structure the assembly until the silver and gold coat the protein/antibody matrix. It would not repair any damage to the wire - in this technology.

      A virus could be used to control the DNA, or structure of the assembly for use later in the development of this technique, but at this point they have only just created a transistor. That is why they used E. Coli. In end of the article it discusses the need for the refinement of the ability to control structures at this level to make nano
    • I don't know how this got to be modded interesting but, here I go:
      >will the DNA auto-repair any damage to the wire?

      Uh, DNA in itself is just a big molecule which isn't capable to do anything at all!
      A cell is capable to repair its own DNA, but obviously the DNA they use is not inside a cell, where they put the wire in place..

      >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?

      If a vi
  • how the Borg got there start...

  • I'd just like to point out.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rostin ( 691447 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @09:21AM (#7527450)
    Further refinement of the technique is required before full scale production would be efficient

    It seems like a lot of the "science with potentially awesome applications" posts that get made to /. 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.
    • don't you know that half of science is presentation? it does not matter so much how good you are (there are many smart scientists), it matters how well you are perceived by others.

      of course, in the process, many promises are made. and they are not neccesarily lies: of course many techniques have large potential. this doesn't mean that they will fulfill this potential -> that is not decided merely on technical grounds, but more on financial/political grounds.

      just my 2c

    • Yeah right (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Chemical engineers, in my experience, are the worst of a bad lot of pocket-protector clad high-caste geeks.
  • The idea: you creat a structure, throw a bunch of nanites onto it, they then lathe the structure with nanites which will, on command, chemically bond with eachother creating your scructure.

    If you've played total annihilation, you know what I'm talking about. Nanolathing was the primary process of building an army. Within an hour a commander could easily take over a planet and begin converting it into a metal world.

  • Adapt the proteosynthesis process (Score:4, Informative)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @09:31AM (#7527478)
    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)
    • Imagine what the possibilities are here. I have heard but no one really knows when AI can be completed but if the process of self building nano-circuits is available when AI is around, then you could make a computer that could not only fix it self it could do self upgrades, and then eventually take over the world. Which is why as technology progresses further and further scientists need to ask themselves not only can it be done, but should it be done.
      • Imagine what the possibilities are here.

        Were I in control of this style of circuit manufacture, I would look into creating artifical neurons -- a small CPU core would provide the basic multiply-accumulate-threshold logic on the neuron. Other multiply-accumulate circuits at the synapses or dendrites would provide long-term adaptation functionality needed for learning.

        The advantage of a neural net appraoch is that it can work with an inexact network. Standard digital electronics are logically fragile
    • > Different polypetides might make transistors, autonomous clock circuits, chemical-to-electrical battery subunits, wires, tees, etc. The problem with "biocomputers" is that typical electronic equipment and biological macromolecules have very different properties. Proteins get their "shape" from very specific conditions, including *temperature*. > An alphabet of tRNA units would carry heavily modified amino-acids and provide both the electrical and structural of properties of the polypeptide. Thi
    • > Different polypetides might make transistors, autonomous clock circuits, chemical-to-electrical battery subunits, wires, tees, etc.
      The problem with "biocomputers" is that typical electronic equipment and biological macromolecules have very different properties. Proteins get their "shape" from very specific conditions, including *temperature*.

      > An alphabet of tRNA units would carry heavily modified amino-acids and provide both the electrical and structural of properties of the polypeptide.
      T
      • The problem with "biocomputers" is that typical electronic equipment and biological macromolecules have very different properties. Proteins get their "shape" from very specific conditions, including *temperature*.

        Good point. Many proteins (such as those in the human body) are very sensitive to temperature, pH, salinity, etc. Yet I suspect that many organisms have thermally robust proteins -- most bacteria, plants, and cold-blooded animals have proteins that must hold their shape over a wide range of te
    • I'm sorry, this is no criticism of your post, but I just realised it's 3:52 AM and I'm reading a website with discussion in which the following words can legitimately occur: ...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
  • Forget batteries. The machines need humans as bacteria fabrication facilities! Poop out IC like chickens laying eggs.

    And right after AMD makes that new chip fab too...
  • ...all that time, money, and effort to protect against viruses... and I get infected by bacteria. Funny thing though, boiling my CPU didn't fix it...hmmm.

    Any technology distinguishable from magic is not suficiently advanced.

  • Large-scale structure will be a formidable problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dunark ( 621237 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @10:31AM (#7527872)
    I'm impressed by the ability to make components, but I think that creating structures of many components may prove to be the more difficult problem.

    As an example, it might not be difficult to design a 1-bit memory cell that can be assembled this way, but how do you make an array of them that is exactly some number of cells on a side, and then attach the interface circuitry to the edges? This would seem to require giving the little buggers the ability to count (or measure), and then change their beheviour when a desired state had been attained.

    The last time I checked, we know a fair amount about how living cells build proteins, but the problem of how the cells know when to build them and how to stick them together has barely been scratched.
    • If computers were to be built using this technique, there would need to be a complete re-working of all the components, as there would probably be new and more efficient methods of hooking all the hardware together, than the current methods. One thing that it might be able to create, is a dynamic self growing array of memory, knowing when a bigger array is needed, it could create more. Just another thought on my part
      • I agree that a new method would be needed, but the new method doesn't have to be more efficient at the individual circuit level. It just has to be more efficient at the top level. IE, it might be prefectly OK if a "bio-cpu" was only one thousandth as fast as a typical silicon microprocessor if you could build a billion-cpu system just by throwing a "supercompter seed" into a nutrient broth.

        I think the area where real advancement is needed is in reducing our dependacy on making components that are all ex
        • I agree with you completely the processor would not have to be faster at all, unfortunately I posted first thing in the morning as I was getting ready for school, and hadn't finished my pot of coffee yet. Having a bunch of smaller slower processors, that possibly generated a lot less heat, and then connecting them together in some sort of cluster would be much more efficient than having one processor.
    • They already have joined component built with this method.. but not on the megascale we're used to in modern procesors.

      I think circuitry built using this approach would have to be thought about in a fundementally different way.

      Fairly obviously (I think) large scale structures like the processors we know and love today would be very dificult to create using this organic approach. A better approach might be to just go for creating very dense, very connected but essentially amorphous 'mats' of computing reso
  • Are you thinking what I'm thinking ...?

    Self-replicating transistors ... protein-based processors ... edible computers!

    -kgj
  • Does that count as life if the DNA is doing that?
  • I thought It was a little far-fetched, but the Nanomachine Swarms in Michael Crichtons "Prey" were manufactured in a similar process. Its a good read, and now it just got a little closer to reality for comfort.

    nick ...
  • I for one welcome our new nanotube overlords.
  • This sounds a lot like the way that nanobots are assembled in the recent novel Prey [amazon.co.uk].

    Anyone interested in nano technology will find this a fascinating novel. A lot of the novel describes some of the science behind nano, and as well as a gripping story, you can actually learn a thing or two.

  • Does this mean I'll have to start washing my hands after I come out of the bathroom AND after work repalce a mainboard? Guess I should'a been doing that anyway.

    Sheesh...

    ** Warning, these comments contain no pro-Linux content and so should viewed with skepticism.**

  • nifty (Score:1)

    by MoFoQ ( 584566 )
    now we can code a human being from DNA that will have code for nanites in their DNA....superhuman beings...here we come!

    (the implications can mean no more need for those herbal pills for lowering cholestoral, acne, etc.)

    hmmmm....resistance is futile....eh?

  • Just kinda reminded me of the whole xml WSDL future vision. Discovery

    Would you or anyone pay to have a computer installed in me for the purposes of information referencing. I can't spell worth a crap unless I'm online using, ;) , Google. I can't function very long without a stable connection. When I lose access, meaning my computer breaks, I fall apart quickly. A ten pound laptop should not be attach to someone "At the Hip" unless I designed it to be, which I have...Several time over and over and over. Rea

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