DNA 'Tricked' to Act as Nano-Building Blocks; McGill Researchers Find New Ways to Manufacture Nanotubes of Controlled Geometry, Stiffness and porosities

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April 12th, 2009 — McGill researchers have succeeded in finding a new way to manufacture nanotubes, one of the important building blocks of the nanotechnology of the future.

Their building material? Biological DNA.

A team of researchers, led by Prof. Hanadi Sleiman in collaboration with Prof. Gonzalo Cosa, both of McGill University's Department of Chemistry, can now tailor different geometries, rigidities and porosities into these nanotubes through the clever introduction of non-DNA molecules. This work is to be reported in the April 13 edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Nanotubes are infinitesimally small, measuring six or seven nanometers across. (A nanometre, one-billionth of a metre, is one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.) One of the important features of these tubes is their extreme length, at about 20,000 nanometres. While they are tiny, they offer an incredibly versatile potential to solve a number of key problems facing nanotechnology researchers. This includes the design of drug delivery vehicles, the manufacture of electronic nanowires, medical implants and scaffolds for solar energy conversion among others.

"It looks like our fabrication is in place," Sleiman said. "We are now looking at potential applications of these materials in drug delivery. It's too early to tell for sure, but this is certainly something worth exploring.

"DNA is an incredible scaffold for making nanotubes."

Nanotechnology's tremendous potential to affect social and economic development is dependent on scientists first being able to make the necessary molecules and materials. To make this happen, nanotechnologists are now using nature's code ...

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