Thursday, April 24, 2008

AFM images of NE1 designed origami

Since this was just announced at FNANO, I can drop it here. I built this DNA origami structure partially in bed using NanoEngineer-1 which also exported all the strand sequences. Those strands were sent off to IDT and Paul Rothemund was kind enough to mix them up and image them. This is the first time anything designed with NE1 was actually built.




MTF

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

any update on when NE1 is going to be released?

jim

Tom said...

technically it was released last night. There will be a final review of the new website and then we'll hook it up to the old nanorex domain, and then everyone can get the release version and source code freely and with out asking.

Guy said...

That is very cool. The manifestation of imagination and information as real physical structure is a freakin' rush!

But you're very lucky to have someone who will "render" the output for you. Anytime I want DNA assembled I have to pay 2-3$ per base pair and that's in nano or picoliter amounts.

Should be fascinating when NE1 becomes readily available to the entire open source community. Probably a big kick in new creativity.

Will Ware said...

This is the first time anything designed with NE1 was actually built.

This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time! I really had no expectation that we'd fabricate anything designed by NE-1 this soon. Massive congratulations to all you guys.

It should be pretty feasible to convert an MMP file into a STL file, and then one could use 3D printers (like RepRap) to make models of proposed molecular structures.

It looks like DNA origami can do 2D structures quite nicely now but isn't yet ready for 3D structures. Maybe one could make a set of 2D parts that self-assemble into a 3D structure using slots and tabs and selectively sticky sites, like the furniture people make with laser cutters, where the pieces are 2D to start with and are then assembled by hand.

I really need to spend more time reading your blog. Beautiful graphics. Some day I'll pester you for the details of how you did those animations.