Molecular Robotics at the Wyss Institute

DNA has often been compared to an instruction book that contains the information needed for a living organism to function, its genes made up of distinct sequences of the nucleotides A, G, C, and T echoing the way that words are composed of different arrangements of the letters of the alphabet. DNA, however, has several advantages over books as an information-carrying medium, one of which is especially profound: based on its nucleotide sequence alone, single-stranded DNA can self-assemble, or bind to complementary nucleotides to form a complete double-stranded helix, without human intervention. That would be like printing the instructions for making a book onto loose pieces of paper, putting them into a box with glue and cardboard, and watching them spontaneously come together to create a book with all the pages in the right order. But just as paper can also be used to make origami animals, cups, and even the walls of houses, DNA is not limited to its traditional purpose as a passive repository of genetic blueprints from which proteins are made – it can be formed into different shapes that serve different functions, simply by controlling the order of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts along its length. A group of scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University is investigating this exciting property of DNA molecules, asking, "What types of systems and structures can we build with them?" They've decided to build robots.