now you can talk about 1 billion of meter and of a course that sounds like a really small distance but it's not necessarily easy to understand how small that really is so i like to use a US penny as a visual aid to connect the concept of a nanometer to something tangible that you can actually hold in your hand if you look at the back of shiny new penny it probably has some kind Captain American shield on it but if you look at the slightly older penny it shows Lincoln Memorial and right in the middle of the memorial there's a tiny Abraham Lincoln and if you can imagine tiny Abraham Lincoln's eyelash you would have about a diameter of 100 nanometers so next time you cross a penny take a look at the back and maybe you could try to imagine that small-scale so now we know x 0 we know know what about technology i like to think of technology is what we get when we take all of our knowledge from science and engineering and harness it for some purpose so in the field of bio nanotechnology we're taking the building blocks of life and specifically the nano scale building blocks and trying to invent new ways of putting them together for useful applications for example one application of bio nanotechnology might be to build tools to help us understand how life works at the molecular level if you want to understand how some device works at the macroscale like an alarm clock the first thing you might do is get some tools to take it apart and look inside to see what’s going on this isn’t really a problem for large objects because it’s easy to make the probably scaled tooled tools but if you imagine shrinking that alarm clock down to the nano scale and then trying to study it that’s going to be much more of a challenge because most of our tools are much bigger than the things that we typically study at that that scale if we want to understand how nano-scale assemblies work I think it makes sense to build tools that are roughly the same size that way it’ll be easy to take apart these systems and understand why they work and the reasons why they might brake and looking forward we might even be able to use these tools or similar ones to fix problems or maybe even make improvements to existing systems the hope is that we can use bio nanotechnology to build new tools that will eventually lead to advances not only in basic science but also in areas like manufacturing and electronics and medicine so if that’s the long-term vision how do we actually tackle this challenge in the lab what we do is we take those exact same components that we find in nature and we reprogram them in different ways and for many researchers myself included are molecule of choice DNA the reason for using DNA is that many properties that make it useful as an information storage molecule in nature also make it attractive as a nano-scale building material and of course everyone in our field owes a great debt to Ned seaman who pioneered this area research atarting with a seminal paper that he published back in nineteen eighty-two the nice thing about DNA is that it’s simple and relatively easy to work with there are only two standard base pairs of DNA has roughly a 2 nanometer diameter and each base is about a third of a nanometers wide and the double helix has a pretty simple and regular helical geometer furthermore nature has evolved an entire enzymatic toolkit for making modifications to DNA such as slicing it together with enzymes called ligases or cutting apart with restriction enzymes or making copies of it with polymer aces it’s also really easy to synthesize DNA from scratch you simply input the sequences into a computer that controls the DNA synthesizer and in a matter of hours you can have pretty much any sequence you want and their companies all over the world that will sell you this synthesized DNA four pennies per base for the last couple decades researchers have been using short pieces of DNA to build various shapes in 2006 Paul Roman at Caltech invented a really power method to build larger and more complicated shapes using hundreds of short strands that bind to a long template strand this method is called DNA origami and it’s been the foundation of my own research for the last several years
so what we do is write computer programs to design sequences of DNA such that when we mix them together they self-assemble into desired shapes with dimensions of 10200 animators recently worked in William she’s lab to extend the DNA origami method to create three-dimensional shapes looking forward we’re currently using DNA origami along with functional modifications such as protein or nanoparticle attachment in order to start building tools that are precisely the right size and shape for carrying out experiments on the nanoscale ok .