Creating nanobots like they do in movies
Design theory seeks to control how they assemble.
Fans of the 2018 film
Avengers: Infinity War will know the scene where Tony Stark taps a panel on his chest to release a billion tiny robots, which rapidly assemble into an Iron Man suit around him.
Tony Stark did something real-world scientists are still struggling to achieve: getting nanobots to combine into larger formations.
Now, a team including researchers from the University of NSW (UNSW), the University of Oxford and Imperial College London has developed a design theory to control how accurately nanobots assemble in the absence of a mould or template. Their research uses biological molecules – namely, DNA – as the component parts of nanobots. The team synthesised a new type of Dna-based building block called Polybricks, which are so small that 2,000 could fit across the thickness of a human hair.
Each of these identical subunits is encoded with a “blueprint” of a pre-defined structure, including a set length. In order to control how many bricks join together – and thus the dimensions of the final product – the team used a design principle called strain accumulation.
“With each block we add, strain energy accumulates between the Polybricks, until ultimately the energy is too great for any more blocks to bind,” Lawrence Lee from UNSW explains.
“It’s this type of fundamental research into how we organise matter at the nanoscale that’s going to lead us to the next generation of nanomaterials, nanomedicines, and nanoelectronics,” says Jonathan Berengut, co-author from UNSW.