The 2-day conference of biophysics in Manchester is over today. It is really an intensive meeting with a tight schedule and lots of new stuffs. The meeting took place in the new building of multi-decipline biocenter. One interesting speech was given by Prof. Andrew J. Turberfield from Oxford university. Recently his group focuses on build some small molecule machines using DNA as the building block. It is just like the small tools which we played when we are children. For examples, he made an small tweezer with four piece of DNA single strands whose sequences are carfully desgined to avoid some secondary structures unwanted.
More interestly, he build a DNA motor which can carry a cargo and move on a DNA track, which is just like a toy train run the small track. Original paper can be seen in Nature's website:
The main idea is that DNA is a fairly stable structure. The sequence is designed in such a way that there is a small segment of extra sequence, which is complementary to other arms. Then this cross-like DNA can be used as building-block to build any 2D crystal with arbitrary shape. The similar principles can be applied to make a 3D terdrehedra, too.
His website is:
http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/cm/people/turberfield.htm