Nano error correction

October 24, 2005

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Molecular-scale manufacturing promises extremely small, fast, cheap devices like computers. Molecular-scale fabrication processes tend to involve chemistry and biology, which are usually simple and inexpensive to carry out, but also error-prone.

This makes it necessary for scientists working on nanofabrication techniques to find ways to minimize errors or to design devices that tolerate errors.

Taking a cue from nature, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed an error correction technique that uses DNA molecules to proofread assemblies of nanoparticles held together by other DNA molecules and cut loose any nanoparticle that does not belong. Nanoparticles are bits of metal or semiconductor only a few nanometers wide. A nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter.

The researchers tested the method by constructing clumps of 5- and 13-nanometer gold particles held together by DNA and edited out the smaller nanoparticles. The method could work with proteins or similar molecules and could be used to assemble nanotubes and nanowires as well as nanoparticles.

Technology Research News: www.trnmag.com