{"id":96922,"date":"2019-10-02T07:22:25","date_gmt":"2019-10-02T14:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/dna-nanomachines-are-opening-medicine-to-the-world-of-physics"},"modified":"2019-10-02T07:22:25","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T14:22:25","slug":"dna-nanomachines-are-opening-medicine-to-the-world-of-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/dna-nanomachines-are-opening-medicine-to-the-world-of-physics","title":{"rendered":"DNA Nanomachines Are Opening Medicine to the World of Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/dna-nanomachines-are-opening-medicine-to-the-world-of-physics2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When I imagine the inner workings of a robot, I think hard, cold mechanics running on physics: shafts, wheels, gears. Human bodies, in contrast, are more of a contained molecular soup operating on the principles of biochemistry.<\/p>\n<p>Yet similar to robots, our cells are also attuned to mechanical forces\u2014just at a much smaller scale. Tiny pushes and pulls, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC5803560\/\">for example<\/a>, can urge stem cells to continue dividing, or nudge them into maturity to replace broken tissues. Chemistry isn\u2019t king when it comes to governing our bodies; physical forces are similarly powerful. The problem is how to tap into them.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/365\/6458\/1080\">a new perspectives article<\/a> in <em>Science<\/em>, Dr. Khalid Salaita and graduate student Aaron Blanchard from Emory University in Atlanta point to DNA as the solution. The team painted a futuristic picture of DNA mechanotechnology, in which we use DNA machines to control our biology. Rather than a toxic chemotherapy drip, for example, a cancer patient may one day be injected with DNA nanodevices that help their immune cells better grab onto\u2014and snuff out\u2014cancerous ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I imagine the inner workings of a robot, I think hard, cold mechanics running on physics: shafts, wheels, gears. Human bodies, in contrast, are more of a contained molecular soup operating on the principles of biochemistry. Yet similar to robots, our cells are also attuned to mechanical forces\u2014just at a much smaller scale. Tiny [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-nanotechnology","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}