![]() The protein streptavidin binds very strongly to the small organic molecule biotin―it grabs on and doesn’t let go. ![]() You don’t just want to assemble it once, you want to do it repeatedly, and not only using the same component, but also new components.”The group took advantage of a chemical system common in biology. “Researchers are now pretty good at putting components in places they desire, but not very good at putting something on and taking it off again. Such versatility could enable many more applications for nanoscale materials, so Lu’s group set out to explore nanoscale systems that could reliably and reversibly assemble.“I think a critical challenge facing nanoscale science and engineering is reversible assembly,” Lu said. But looking at biology, Lu saw a lot of dynamic assemblies: reversible building processes, or substitutions that could be made after assembly to add or change function. Such assembly is important for applications in electronics, photonics, medicine and much more.Most standard nano-assembly techniques yield a particular, static product. Led by Yi Lu, the Schenck Professor of Chemistry, the team published its development in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.Scientists and engineers who work with nanoscale materials use an important technique called programmable assembly to strategically combine simple building blocks into larger functional components or structures. ![]() ![]() The message is simple, but decoding it unlocks the secret of dynamic nanoscale assembly.Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have devised a dynamic and reversible way to assemble nanoscale structures and used it to encrypt a Morse code message. Hidden in a tiny tile of interwoven DNA is a message. ![]()
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