Bottom-UP assembly of nanorobots: extending synthetic biology to complex material design

Abstract

Today nanotechnology is being researched in a variety of different fields like sustainable energy, life extending medicine, material science and electronic [1]. Nanotechnology enables researchers to program and control the matter at the atomic level using cutting-edge tools like atomic force microscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy [2]. This idea could be used as a step ahead assembling molecules, drugs, and materials at the atomic scale and making nanomachines smaller, which would allow more room for complexity accuracy, and evolution. Future nanotechnology taking inspiration from nature will open routes for the molecular manufacturing for the construction of macroscopic products with nanoscopic precision via bottom-up nanorobot mass fabrication for the drug delivery [3]. This will complement the current nanorobotics manufacturing via top-down approaches used for targeting the therapeutics to inaccessible sites in vivo. It will be essentially 3D chemical printing of large functional molecular structure from basic biochemical building blocks one atom at a time. the broad idea of a nanomachine is that could be programmed to turn even the most basic raw materials into complex structures like microchips, therapeutic proteins, custom DNA or a therapeutic device. However, a single nanomachine on its own cannot perform complex function; we need further to manufacture more of these tiny machines via coding and programming the DNA/RNA/amino acids complementary sequences using Artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine learning, and then integrate into living cells like E. coli. The envisioned future is possible via bio-assembly using synthetic biology approaches (Figure 1) [4].