Engineering news
Artificially replicating the way in which flowers change shape and behaviour in response to their surroundings could offer a promising route to smart new materials – and a team of researchers hopes it has achieved just that with tiny ‘DNA flowers’.
Developed at the University of North Carolina (UNC), the microscopic soft robots are formed of crystals made by combining DNA with inorganic materials. Capable of reversibly folding and unfolding in just seconds, the tiny objects could be used for tasks including delivering medicine to specific parts of the body or cleaning up environmental pollution.
“Each flower’s DNA acts like a tiny computer program, telling it how to move and react to the world around it. When the environment changes, such as when acidity rises or falls, the flower can open, close or trigger a chemical reaction,” a UNC announcement said.
Swallowable or implantable shape-changing flowers could be designed to deliver a targeted dose of drugs, perform a biopsy or clear a blood clot, suggested developer Dr Ronit Freeman, senior author of a paper on the work. “People would love to have a smart capsule that would automatically activate medication when it detects disease and stop when it is healed. In principle, this could be possible with our shapeshifting materials.”
That capability is possible because of the way in which DNA is arranged inside the flower-shaped crystals. When the surrounding environment becomes more acidic, parts of the DNA fold tightly, causing the flower to close. When conditions return to normal, the DNA loosens and the petals open again. That motion could be used to control chemical reactions, carry and release molecules, or interact with cells and tissues.
Although the technology is still in early testing, the team envisions “exciting” future uses. The microscopic robots could be injected into the body and travel to a tumour, for example, where they would release medicine or take tiny tissue samples.
“Beyond medicine, these smart materials could be used to clean up environmental disasters, releasing cleaning agents into polluted water and then dissolving harmlessly when the job is done. They could even store massive amounts of digital information, up to two trillion gigabytes in just a teaspoon, offering a greener, more efficient way to store, read and write data in the future,” the announcement said.
The work was published in Nature Nanotechnology.
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