Electronics on the molecular scale.
Researchers have shrunk down one of the fundamental components of modern electronics, creating the world's smallest diode out of a single molecule of DNA. In fact, it's so tiny, you can't even see it using a conventional microscope.
Diodes are electronic devices that make it easy for current to flow in one direction, but not another. In other words, they're responsible for moving current around a lot of common electronics, and are printed by the millions onto modern-day silicon chips. But to increase the processing power of these chips, we need to make diodes a lot smaller, which is where DNA comes into it.
When thinking about designing smaller diodes and electronics, researchers have long been focussing on using single molecules, since they're the smallest stable structure imaginable.
Following that line of thought, Xu and his team figured DNA would be a perfect candidate, seeing as it has a predictable structure, is diverse, and is also highly programmable.
But what they weren't sure of was whether it could control the flow of electric current, like a diode needs to. To be clear, no diode is perfectly efficient - in a perfect world, a diode would block 100 percent of current in one direction, and would allow infinite current flow in the other.
But in reality, today's diodes still let a tiny current pass back and forth each direction. Overall, what defines diode is that there's an imbalance in how they transmit current, and the bigger that imbalance, the better.
To get DNA to do this, the team took a single strand that was just 11 base pairs long (pretty tiny when you consider inside every cell of our bodies we have DNA strands with approximately 3 billion base pairs all curled up). They then added a molecule called coralyne into the helix structure, and connected the whole thing to a tiny electronic circuit only a few nanometers long.
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