Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” seems to have a special appeal for scientists, who have recreated it using bacteria, among other media, in the past. Now scientists at Caltech have made their own tiny version of the painting—a dime’s width across—out of folded DNA molecules. Some day the same technique could be used to build teensy biosensors, or for targeted drug delivery.
It’s called “DNA origami,” and while many different kinds of shapes have been created using it, this is the first proof of concept that it’s possible to scale up and build large numbers of DNA based devices on computer chips. The Caltech team described their work in a new paper in Nature.
via Gizmodo
Image: P. Rothemund et al./Caltech
