BioTechnology

Nanotechnology researchers are often troubled by lack of availability of biotechnology products. However, now research itself is being claimed to have found a solution.

Nanotechnology research is an ever growing area of science, and scientists working in its realm use a variety of substances to build atomic scale structures.

To solve their problem of shortage of raw materials, scientists at the Arizona State University' Biodesign Institute plan to use cells as manufacturing units to make DNA based nanostructures in a living cell.

Historically, biotech products have been produced by biotechnology companies by chemically synthesizing all of the products from scratch. And much of the process entails using different toolboxes to make varied DNA nanostructures and get them to attach and organize with other molecules viz. nanoparticles and other biomolecules.

However, now it is has been found that artificial nanostructures can be replicated using the mechanisms already present in live cells. The best part is that, you don't have to manufacture cells, and also that nature itself has endowed them with the ability to making copies of double stranded DNA. The only thing scientists have to do is to get them to make complex DNA nanostructures like a copier machine does.

When going about brainstorming for the solution, scientists thought of using the cellular system as simple DNA can be easily replicated in a cell. But the problem was that they didn't know whether the cells' replicating mechanism would tolerate single stranded DNA nanostructures that house complex secondary structures or not? In the end it did.

Just the beginning though, this research appears to be quite exciting as in the future it may be used in synthetic biology applications. Perhaps as the technique is perfected, and when biotechnology companies and the biotech pharmaceutical industry implements the research full-on, there won't be any dearth of biotechnology products for scientists and the medical industry.