is the cross disciplinary study of the merging of nanotechnology
and genetics, i.e. using genetic nanostructure to create nanometer size
machines, etc or “Nanogenes”. I first thought of this term in the summer
of 1997 while vacationing in Michigan.
The first mention that I can find of the mixing
of genetics and nanotechnology is the novel ‘’Blood Music’’ by Greg Bear
published in 1985. In that novel Mr. Bear creates white blood cells with
a certain degree of intelligence and the ability to change and evolve.(See
Greg
Bear or Blood
Music)
The basic primer on nanotechnology is Richard Feynman’s
December 29, 1959 lecture ‘’There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’’(Feynman
Article) Other sources of nanotechnology information are :
- Nanotechnology at
Xerox
- Nanotechnology
at Mitre
- Nanomedicine
While the current state of nanotechnological development
is for the most part theoretical, I propose to present a new line of discussion
for my project. Most prior work has held that assemblers must be self replicating
in an androgynous sense, and have great strength in the form of diamond
or fullerene backbones. As an alternative I propose binary nanogenetic
assemblers which are incomplete in and of themselves and read the instruction
set coded into the external DNA sequence of a mated pair or controller
assembler and which consists of low strength inert composites upon which
a coded DNA fragment is placed. These nanogene fragments need not
be limited to acting as pairs for purposes of assembly but can act as teams
of three or more. One of the difficulties of prior work is the conceptual
problem of how to store the coded instruction set in a single nano-unit.
By using the DNA fragments of other nanogenes as the instruction set ,depending
on complexity, the instruction set can be parsed among multiple nanogenes.
Errors common in DNA replication can be minimized by the use of yeast type
telomeres as nanogene ‘’stop ‘’ or ‘’start’’ instructions. If you would
like to discuss this or any other nanogenetic topic please email me at
the address below.
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 E-mail:
michael@nanogenetics.com |
Additional souces of information are Leonard
Adleman's 11/94 Science Article "Molecular Computation..."first describing
DNA Computers
Erik's Molecular Computation page
Laura Landweber's Gene Scrambling, and DNA Computing