hen we talk about the uses of nanotechnology in medical applications, we can be confident in stating that nanoparticles offer more physical scope for functional engineering than, say, other molecules (I am thinking of either naturally occurring ones and artificially…
Medical applications of RNA and other nanoparticles
DNA as ‘new’ information storage devices
So two developments recently are showing that in the not too distant future, we will be able to take advantage of DNA’s vast ability to encode information within its structure, and I know nature has been doing this for a while now, but this will be the first time we are able to harness this ability for our daily electronic devices. Now this is not so much a matter of encoding information into the molecules, but like any storage device, the key is the reading mechanism. And here is where the breakthrough is currently happening, research groups in the US are using nanopores to control the manner in which single DNA strands flow through, allowing them to be ‘read’.
