The ground-breaking devices outlined in the journal Nature, could one day lead to armies of surgeon robots that could clean human arteries or build computer components.
In one of the projects a team from New York's Columbia University created a spider bot just four nanometres across. This is about 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
Robots of the future could operate at the nano-scale level, cleaning arteries or building computer components
The nano-spider moves along a track comprising stitched-together strands of DNA that is essentially a pre-programmed course.
A molecular nanorobot dubbed a 'spider' and labeled with green dyes moves along a DNA track to its red-labeled goal.
To watch the spider in motion, the researchers used atomic force microscopy which showed the molecular robots following four different paths.
Molecular robots have drawn huge interest because of the allure of programming them to sense their environment and react to it.
For instance, they could note disease markers on a cell surface, decide that the cell is cancerous and needs to be destroyed and then deliver a compound to kill it.
Yeremiah Hardt
yeremiah@aol.com
