A MOLECULAR motor has been built out of DNA. The technology could one day be
used to make self-assembling electronic components or chemical
factories-on-a-chip.
Bernard Yurke and his colleagues at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey made a
tweezer-like structure out of three strands of DNA. When a fourth strand is
added to the mixture, it joins the loose ends of the tweezers, pulling them
shut. Adding yet another strand of DNA pops the tweezers open (Nature,
vol 406, p 605).
鈥淲hat鈥檚 new is the use of DNA as a fuel,鈥� says team member Andrew Turberfield
of the University of Oxford. 鈥淭o get controllable motion on a nanometre scale is
really quite fantastic.鈥�
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