Vacuum Mechanosynthesis Exploration

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...