 "Photo: Courtsey of Rutgers Bio-Nano Robotics Web Site")
A patient is rushed via ambulance to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. He has a damaged organ from a car accident. Upon arrival, the doctor greets the patient with a needle and injects bionanos into the bloodstream, which begin to repair the damaged organ and cell structure.
No, this scenario is not from a science fiction movie. It could be a reality for medical technology if University Associate Professor Constantinos Mavroidis and visiting Professor Martin Yarmush and their research staff and partners are successful in building tiny bionano motors and robots.
The mechanical and aerospace, biomedical, and chemical and biochemical engineering departments at the University are working together to develop a prototype of an ultra-tiny motor called the Viral Protein Nano Motor. The National Science Foundation and its Nanoscale Science and Engineering program have given the project a four-year grant exceeding $1 million to help fund the research.
Nano - the abbreviated term for nanotechnology - is the study and process of working with devices and assembling structures by using atom or molecule-sized building blocks.
The University professors using this concept have taken proteins from viruses like influenza to build this futuristic motor. Though invisible to the naked eye, these nano components could potentially work to revolutionize medicine.
What is being created
Composed from proteins normally found on the surface of viruses, these tiny structures would be able to open and close their configurations in response to the same biological stimuli as in their native environment, but this time in an artificial setting, said Mavroidis, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and principal investigator for the project.
"The vision is that it will be possible to assemble many nano-machine components such as the viral protein nanomotors that we study, and be able to form very small nano robots that move around," he said. "The idea is that by making small nano robots that will be powered out of these bionano motors, one could potentially use them to repair a cell."
Connecting the motor with other biological and structural elements is where chemistry and biochemistry come in, Mavroidis said. "No one has tried this to the extent that we're doing it. It's really very new. It's a new molecular motor and the assembly of various biological elements that can work together in a multi-component bio-nano system."
The Goal
The long term goal of the research is to develop "revolutionary biomolecular machine components that can be assembled and form multi-degree of freedom nanodevices that will be able to apply forces and manipulate objects in the nanoworld, transfer information from the nano to the macro world and also be able to travel in the nanoenvironment," according a synopsis of the research on the University's Web site.
The specific aims of the project are:
* To identify proteins that can be used as motors in nano machines.
* To develop models and realistic simulations to predict the performance accurately.
* To demonstrate the validity of the proposed concept of the bio-nano motors by doing a series of biomolecular experiments.
* To study the interface of the protein motors with other biomolecular components such as DNA and carbon-nanotubes.
"Various bio-nano components like our linear motor will be developed throughout the world over the next 10 years," Mavroidis said. "Availability of these components will then pave the way for development of complete nanorobotic assemblies in the ensuing years."
Though this is all just research conducted with computational and experimental models, the team is planning to have a working prototype ready by 2007. "Two years ago, our ideas seemed very ambitious, like science fiction. Now it's becoming a reality," Mavroidis said.
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