Chemically modified DNA
What the?! This stuff is actually mind-boggling!
So tonight I took in my copy of Nature from the mail and opened it up…and saw smiley faces. I thought this was the coolest thing I had seen in a while: Paul W.K. Rothemund, a researcher at Caltech, has figured out a way to cause DNA to fold into arbitrary patterns (Nature calls it DNA origami). The patterns include, of all things, a nano-scale smiley face (I’m glad to see he has a sense of humor! The article actually has a number of other very interesting patterns that demonstrate the utter generality of the technique). And when I say nano-scale smiley, I mean a smiley face that’s smaller than 100 nm across. Given that fabs struggle to get a single rectangular strip of polysilicon to print that is 65 nm, this is a really remarkable result.
That looks like fun :)
I read about this in the paper, and he was making things like models of America etc.