Molecular Robot

From the Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics at the University of Oxford in England comes a programmable DNA robot.

The robot is made up of sub-microscopic synthetic DNA and moves along tracks separated by only 6nm (nanometers).

The robot can be programmed using something called a “fuel hairpin”.  This is  a molecule that acts as a fuel cell and also carries instructions on which way the robot should go, allowing it to go right or left when it comes to a junction.  Hopefully in the future this would allow doctors to precisely target where drugs should end up in a patients body.

The research was done by Andrew Turbefield, a professor at Oxford, along with other colleagues.

Image of a DNA strand from Wikimedia Commons.

Link via (Science Daily) via (SpaceRef)