All posts by inmortra

In the macroscopic world every product is assembled following a blueprint and using a set of assemblers with fixed bricks and boards. In bionanomachines the same principle is used, the assembler is the ribosome and the blueprints is the DNA. There is stored the information needed to construct different kinds of products. The process is simple and universal, for every organism on Earth is done as described in previous chapters.

Continue Reading

The first step to construct any nanomachine is to build the structure. This is not an easy goal, atoms can't be modeled as they were any macroscopic material. They follow a set of rules to interact with another atoms.

Chemists have studied the properties of these atoms and biologists the details of the nanomachines constructed by them. So we have now the knowledge to start creating these new nanomachines. We are going to review the different methods followed to do that.

The natural bionanomachinery is designed for a specific environment. It is done for working inside cells, in a water environment. Without that conditions they don't work properly or don't work at all. The temperature is also important, the most common is 37º. In this environment nanomachines are stable, but they can be destroyed to create new ones with a little energy cost. The life of a nanomachine is between seconds to a year (but this is rare).

Continue Reading

We have now many methods to construct atomic-level machines. Bionanotechnology is the easiest way to do that because there are already nanomachines that can work for us. We don't have to implement everything, atom by atom, by ourselves. To do this we can make those machines to construct molecules they already can make but with some little changes, or we can design nanomachines entirely and make those already implemented workers to make them for us. But this is much more difficult than introduce some changes. For example, if we know a protein that actually works it is easier to give it some new features than to construct a whole protein from scratch because it is still a expensive problem to predict the structure of that protein, and it is important for the operation of that protein.

Recombinant DNA technology is the main process to construct this proteins. It is about changing the DNA that stores the information to create the protein and then wait until ribosoms create it for us. We use two natural enzimes for this, restriction enzimes and DNA ligase. Using this we can cut and paste DNA to make our own sequence.Some of this enzimes are being sold in the market, so now it is easy and not so expensive to manipulate DNA. There is a variety of natural biomolecules for handling DNA, like:Restriction enzimes: isolated from bacteria. Used to cut DNA.DNA ligase: reconnects broken DNA strands.DNA polymerase creates a new DNA strand by using another strand as a template.
Once we have a new DNA we can duplicate it using: DNA cloning and polymerase chain reaction.
The DNA cloning create identical chains. To do this we can inject DNA in a virus and let it to inject the DNA in some bacteria. Then they will duplicate, so we will have a lot of identical cells.
The polymerase chain reaction is for coping a small sample of DNA. We use another bacteria for this. Forte it to duplicate. Using this method we can have as many DNA as we need.
Continue Reading

In a human body there are more than 10,000 types of nanomachines working. But there are one that is the most important for us: the ribosome. That molecule is the one that "construct" proteins from a DNA molecule. This proteins can be enzymes (useful for industry and medicine) or any other type of proteins.But this nanomachines are not like the machines we are used to see in the macroscopic universe. They are not ruled by the usual forces we know (gravity, inertia) as we are. The fact that they are a discrete number of atoms makes them to avoid the effects we know. So gravity can be considered non-existent, same for inertia or friction. But another forces are important, like thermal motion, that are really important in this scale. For example, every molecule inside a cell is supposed to interact in a single second with all of its neighbours. So they are continually being hit by another particles. That makes the structure of the molecules a really important feature.This machines works inside a water enviroment.

Continue Reading

I'm going to write here a little summary of the book "Bionanotechnology: Lessons from Nature" writen by David S. Goodsell. This is an assignment for my major in Bioinformatics in the University of New Orleans. I hope you will enjoy it ;) Please, report any error to correct it. I'm learning and it will be very useful for me :D 

Nanotechnology is the ability to construct any kind of machine with a known and predefined number of atoms, instead of the traditional machines which have an arbitrary number of them. To do this, one idea is to construct an "assembler", a machine capable of making another machines. This machine was supposed to be the great new advance, with it the "2-weeks revolotion" would be possible. This is, if you have a machine able to construct another machines in a very short time you can do whatever you want. But nowadays this is far from our possibilities. That is why the bionanotechnology is important.Biology already has implemented an extraordinary number of nanomachines and has tested them during millions of years within an evolution process. This tests are much more optimized than any test we can make. In each single cell it is a really big number of nanomachines working, and they actually create another nanomachines. So nature has already created those assemblers we are looking for. Using that machines to create our own machines is bionanotechnology.Nanotechnology is a pretty new science. It began with the alchemists, then continued with the chemistry and in the 20th century it has been improved by nuclear physics.In the other hand biology began to play with molecules so the biotechnology started. If we join this two sciences we have a good way to manipulate individual atoms to create everything we can imagine.Thanks to this we can create specific nanomachines to work in many different fields, but the most important is medicine.