PNA Molecules Could Be Used To Build Nanodevices

October 4, 2005 | Source: KurzweilAI

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have shown that the binding of metal ions can mediate the formation of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) duplexes from single strands of PNA that are only partly complementary. This result opens new opportunities to create functional, three-dimensional nanosize structures such as molecular-scale electronic circuits, which could reduce by thousands of times the size of today’s common electronic devices.

“DNA nanotechnology has led to the construction of sophisticated three-dimensional nanoarchitectures composed exclusively from nucleic acid strands. These structures can acquire a completely new set of magnetic and electrical properties if metal ions are incorporated in the nucleic acids at specific locations because the metal ions have unpaired electrons,” said Catalina Achim, assistant professor of chemistry at the Mellon College of Science. “Our goal is to harness the information storage ability of metalcontaining PNAs to build molecular-scale replicas of today’s electronic circuit components, such as wires, diodes and transistors.”

The research results will appear in the October 26 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Source: Carnegie Mellon news release