Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 14, 2012

DNA nanotechnology is the design and manufacture of artificial nucleic acid structures for technological uses. In this field, nucleic acids such as DNA are used as non-biological engineering materials for nanotechnology rather than as the carriers of genetic information in living cells. Researchers in the field have created static structures such as crystal lattices, nanotubes, polyhedra, and arbitrarily shaped DNA origami; as well as functional structures including molecular machines and DNA computers. The conceptual foundation for DNA nanotechnology was first laid out in the early 1980s, and the field began to attract widespread interest in the mid-2000s. The field is beginning to be used as a tool to solve basic science problems in structural biology and biophysics, such as protein structure determination, and potential real-world applications in nanomedicine and molecular scale electronics are under development. (more...)

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