Thursday, 13th October 2005 (4237 views)

A step towards making functional nanostructures out of biological materials has been made by engineers at Duke University, North Carolina.

A team, led by Ashutosh Chilkoti, has discovered how to vertically add to strands of DNA by using the enzyme TdTase, all the while working on the nanoscale with the DNA attached to gold plates.

Short DNA strands are put on a gold surface, lithographed onto a silicon substrate, which is then coated with the enzyme. After an hour the DNA strands have lengthened a hundredfold.

Previous research led to the team using enzymes to carve troughs into DNA strands and, teamed with this new advance, the researchers believe that it could lead to "the automated study of biology at the molecular scale".

Gold is frequently used in experiments and is particularly useful in biological applications as it is not damaging to the human body.

 

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