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brave new world



The worry is that the search for rich patents will proceed carelessly. It has
been reported that nanotubes will cause health problems and the genes used in
GM crops are now mainly synthetic.
Dan Ferber
Science Jan 9 2004: 158-161 SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY:
Microbes Made to Order
A new breed of bioengineers aims to create microbes from off-the-shelf parts.
The parts are coming, but will researchers be able to put them together?



Virus-Based Toolkit for the Directed Synthesis of Magnetic and Semiconducting
Nanowires

Chuanbin Mao, Daniel J. Solis, Brian D. Reiss, Stephen T. Kottmann, Rozamond
Y. Sweeney, Andrew Hayhurst, George Georgiou, Brent Iverson, and Angela M.
Belcher
Science Jan 9 2004: 213-217.
Virus-Based Toolkit for the Directed Synthesis of Magnetic and Semiconducting
Nanowires

We report a virus-based scaffold for the synthesis of single-crystal ZnS, CdS,
and freestanding chemically ordered CoPt and FePt nanowires, with the means of
modifying substrate specificity through standard biological methods. Peptides
(selected through an evolutionary screening process) that exhibit control of
composition, size, and phase during nanoparticle nucleation have been
expressed on the highly ordered filamentous capsid of the M13 bacteriophage.
The incorporation of specific, nucleating peptides into the generic scaffold
of the M13 coat structure provides a viable template for the directed
synthesis of semiconducting and magnetic materials. Removal of the viral
template by means of annealing promoted oriented aggregation-based crystal
growth, forming individual crystalline nanowires. The unique ability to
interchange substrate-specific peptides into the linear self-assembled
filamentous construct of the M13 virus introduces a material tunability that
has not been seen in previous synthetic routes. Therefore, this system
provides a genetic toolkit for growing and organizing nanowires from
semiconducting and magnetic materials.

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