Tag Archives: Shmulik Ittah

Computerized cockroaches as precursors to new healing techniques

The last time I wrote about cockroaches was in a June 26, 2013 posting about cyborg cockroaches and neuroscience. This latest cockroach item, which concerns new therapeutic approaches, comes from an April 8, 2014 article by Sarah Spickernell for New Scientist (Note: A link has been removed),

It’s a computer – inside a cockroach. Nano-sized entities made of DNA that are able to perform the same kind of logic operations as a silicon-based computer have been introduced into a living animal.

The DNA computers – known as origami robots because they work by folding and unfolding strands of DNA – travel around the insect’s body and interact with each other, as well as the insect’s cells. When they uncurl, they can dispense drugs carried in their folds.

“DNA nanorobots could potentially carry out complex programs that could one day be used to diagnose or treat diseases with unprecedented sophistication,” says Daniel Levner, a bioengineer at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.

Levner and his colleagues at Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, made the nanobots by exploiting the binding properties of DNA. When it meets a certain kind of protein, DNA unravels into two complementary strands. By creating particular sequences, the strands can be made to unravel on contact with specific molecules – say, those on a diseased cell. When the molecule unravels, out drops the package wrapped inside.

Spickernell’s description of the researchers’ plan to increase the amount of computing power in a cockroach to the equivalent of an eight-bit computer seems eye-opening until you read about their plans for preliminary human clinical trials using the same technique for mammals as they have in insects.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the research paper,

Universal computing by DNA origami robots in a living animal by Yaniv Amir, Eldad Ben-Ishay, Daniel Levner, Shmulik Ittah, Almogit Abu-Horowitz, & Ido Bachelet. Nature Nanotechnology (2014) doi:10.1038/nnano.2014.58 Published online 06 April 2014

The paper is behind a paywall but there is an option for a free preview via ReadCube access.