Paper http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1281 … and nice perspective piece http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1244 … by Long and Williams. A LONG backstory follows... Back in 2006-2007 or so, my main obsession was nanotechnology, and my imagination was truly ignited by the work of Paul Rothemund, my mentors William
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was the possibility of running expansion microscopy in reverse! If one could do that, one could create optically-defined spots (in 3D) for attaching materials, and then shrink these spots down to a level where they become usefully nanoscale (e.g., for optical meta-materials
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applications where you want structures smaller than the wavelength of light). Thus, connecting back to the lineage of thinking around the nm2cm project, rather than than trying to make *bigger* building blocks to cover or bridge between optically defined spots, one could instead
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make the spots themselves *smaller*. So that is, in essence, what this paper does -- it optically patterns a hydrogel, then shrinks the resulting pattern. Now, nanotechnology still has a very very long way to go, particularly I think in accessing the length-scales of covalent
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chemistry, which are even smaller than the few nanometer minimum feature size on a DNA origami... an orthogonal but perhaps even more important problem compared to the mesoscale assembly problem that we tackle here. Moreover, extending ImpFab to create economically useful
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devices at scale, and perhaps, if it proves useful, to the kinds of integrated nm2cm DNA templated assemblies
@geochurch and I envisioned, requires several further major steps. But I'm happy to look back on how a number of serendipitous intersections of people and technologies,Show this thread -
and amazing work in the lab and on the whiteboard by Dan and Sam and the other co-authors, has led to an early milestone with this publication. Thanks to all the supporters of convergent technology involved this this work! /end
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