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Molecular Robotics & Computing

Center for Molecular Cybernetics

Detailed explanations about computing and robotics can be found at:
www.thespiderworld.org
www.thespiderworld.com

Why do we study moving molecules?

Really simple: you (the reader) are an assembly of many Avogadro’s numbers of molecules that somehow overcame their natural tendency to diffuse away in separate directions.  We can argue that through intricately controlled motions the many molecules that form your body make you somehow understand this text and make you feel excited (hopefully) about what you are reading.  

We (Stojanovic’s group with collaborators from Center for Molecular Cybernetics, www.thespiderworld.org) start with simpler systems, in which individual molecules are programmed to perform certain tasks, such as move from point A to point B.  Then we look whether such molecules can perform additional tasks on their way, such as pick up load at C and drop it of at D.  While these sound as trivial accomplishments for each of individual molecules, their strength is in their numbers.  Thus, we also study what happens when two or more molecules influence each other and communicate.  From a computer science stand point, we can have one Turing machine moving over an endless tape in infinite time, with well-defined transitions, capable of powerful computing.  Or we can have many smaller machines, each performing one simple task with very short and rapid walks, but we have also the ability to couple them together.  Thus, in the long run, we are looking to explain the raise of complexity from simple, programmable, systems with moving molecules.  Such raise could have happened billions of years ago, but that is less important (we will never know for certain) than that it now gives raise to a new science, the chemistry of molecular robots.  We are centered in the Division of Experimental Therapeutics, because one day mixtures of molecules, each performing simple tasks, will repair your tissues, eliminate cancerous cells, or autonomously release insulin upon increase in glucose concentration in blood.  Or they will build an electronic device, from invisible scratch, in front of your eyes.  What we are trying to do now is just the beginning.

Milan's Group: Steven, Mihela, Dmitry, Aihna and Renjun

Our methods can be applied to many systems, inorganic, organic, or biological.  However, we focus mostly on artificial DNA systems, because of the available tools and because we know how to control them well.  Our currently most processive molecular movers are spiders.  Spiders are polycatalytic assemblies that undergo self-repelling random walk over surfaces covered with substrates.  Essentially, if you release a spider on substrates, it will keep moving in the direction of new substrates, without leaving the surface, until it runs out of substrates.  The spider will then switch to ordinary random walk (read Paul Krapivsky’s papers on spider theory here LINK).  You can also read the initial paper on Spiders called NICKs in (jacs06 Milan).  Since that publication, with our collaborators we expanded these systems to 2D surfaces and origami linear landscapes. 

We have chemists, computer scientists, biophysicist, physicists, mathematicians, and even people who call themselves nanotechnologists.  One can argue that the roots of our projects are closest to chemistry, much of our thinking comes from computer science, while, by an accident of nature, our systems are in the right size to take advantage of nanotechnology.

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