Introduction
We control the behavior of individual molecules much in the same way one can control macroscopic (“traditional”) robots. Well, not exactly in the same way: we control molecular movement by carefully programming interactions between molecules and the landscapes they traverse. Our molecules are nucleic acids, but, within the next several years, we hope to expand our approach to other chemical systems. Programmable molecules could let us interface with existing living systems through gene regulation and signaling. We could also create biosensors for a number of organic materials to assist in detecting biohazards or other harmful living creatures. The number of potential applications is huge. On this website, you can read about our work, learn about different molecular computing techniques and contact us if you have any questions.
Our research involves many different scientific disciplines, requiring extensive
collaboration between diverse experts.
Luckily, we are able to communicate together, as part of an online virtual
team from different universities, to synergistically build something useful, new, exciting and fun.
Our research has contributed to knowledge in the fields of chemistry,
computer science, mathematics and others.
Our principle investigators, graduate students, researchers, technicians
and other collaborators all have been developing valuable research and
technical skills in the pursuit of knowledge.
We hope we have described our collaborative efforts in an easy to understand way
(for recent publications and updates, please see
). In the meantime, you can enjoy reading a brief popular description of our research
(
) or you can read everything
(
) about our most advanced landscape, molecular origami, as this work
has already been published by one of our principal investigators,
and it helped win some prestigious
awards (e.g., MacArthur Awards
, and Feynman Awards
).
We are a group of scientists from many disciplines that work together
on this interesting problem. Our full list of collaborators is also
available (please see
).
Finally, we want to thank the National Science Foundation (mostly CISE Directorate) for supporting our members over many years in the high-risk research that eventually culminated with our proposal to start experiments in actual molecular robotics. The establishment of our Center was funded through the Chemical Bonding Center grant (CHE-0514006) from the Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation.
