Silicon-Protein Interfaces
Current fabrication methods allow us to work at macroscopic scales (10^0 m) down to the nanometer scale (10^-8 m) with photolithography, and further down to the atomic scale (10^-10 m) with proteins. However, directly bridging from macroscopic to atomic scales (10^0 m to 10^-10 m) for nanotechnology applications remains a significant challenge. A key obstacle is the lack of effective interfaces between single addressable electrodes and proteins.
Resources (1)
R&D Gaps (1)
Our current methods do not allow precise control over the positional placement of atoms or groups during chemical synthesis, limiting our ability to build molecules with atomic precision. A general-purpose approach to atomically precise fabrication was envisioned by Drexler in the 1980s and Feynman in the late 1950s. DNA origami made a leap in 2006, but DNA is in some key ways a much less precise and versatile nanoscale building material than proteins/peptides. A promising path would extend “DNA origami” to “protein carpentry” by adapting Beta Solenoid proteins, or other modular protein components with programmable binding properties, as lego-like building blocks and then using the latter to construct massively parallel protein-based 3D printers for lego-like covalent assembly of a restricted set of chemical building blocks. This one is riskier: how programmably can we really control protein assembly, and could we bootstrap from initial crappy prototype protein-carpentry-and-or-DNA-ori...