Shih and Shawn Douglas, and others, on scaffolded DNA origami -- DNA-based molecular breadboards for patterning arbitrary materials at the nanoscale. The problem, I felt at the time, was that those breadboards were still far too small: they needed to be chip-scale and
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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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