Nathan,
-- > But you still have the issue of assembling them, and you haven't
> really given a reason why a nanotube would be better than a nanopore.
Nanotubes are just one concept out of many. I have ideas for your concerns, and we'll get to those in a minute.
> The guy's starting HP in their garage were building the egg before a
> chicken existed because they had a greater vision.
We have a greater vision here as well, just as the founders of HP did. While the whole world is drooling over GMO foods gone wrong, the field of biotech is pushing all kinds of boundaries. Plants as street lights, sutures made of DNA, et cetera. What the world wants is a horror story, like how they want robots to take over the world. Things like the Terminator Scenario sell well, as does the concept of Franken-food. Those of us who aren't so inclined to fear mongering, as our friends in the press seem to enjoy so much, don't have to worry about what the world is drooling over, just as all the great pioneers of computing didn't.
> There are lots of simply tricks buried in known science and
> engineering, stuff that's so simple it blows your mind when you
> realize it's beauty.
I completely agree, and that is exactly the kind of technology we want to build this chip on. That's why I bring this up now after staying quiet for so long. I realized this idea of a read/write chip for DNA was getting no where within the University I'm at because of how small and perhaps over-academic the pool of people is, so I'm opening it up. Let people try to patent it; we'll slap an open-source license on it faster than they can say "patent pending." The only way for a community to get things done is through trust, and I trust all of you.
So, back to the true issue at hand: The actual read and write mechanisms. Let's try building a small list of options first, and then go through each and pick a top two in each category.
I'm partial to using carbon nanotubes as reaction centers because, as I said before, their size is easy to control, they are easy to make, and their properties are fairly well known at this point. We can use a static field to control their position on a chip down to nanometers, which is exactly what we need. The experimental setup wont be cheap, but we can wrangle something up and it's not like anything will be, that's the problem. A nanopore has no length, so it wouldn't be all too useful as the actual reaction center of either read or write, though I like the idea of a layered microfluidic system. The challenge there would be to have DNA held in known locations, but that's something we can surmount.
Raman spectroscopy and gold nanoparticles are both up for the read "head," but neither would be easy to do. Other ideas?
-L
-L
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en
Learn more at www.diybio.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/8e285e42-c036-442d-8963-3800524c0658%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
0 comments:
Post a Comment