Cornell Engineers Create a Robotic Material That Displays 3 of The Key Traits For Life

Science Alert  April 21, 2019
Researchers at Cornell University have created a new biomaterial called DASH: DNA-based Assembly and Synthesis of Hierarchical materials, that isn’t alive, but exhibits three key traits for life: metabolism, self-assembly, and organisation. It can crawl forward like a slime mold, grow new strands from the front as the old ones at the back decay and fall away. At the core of DASH are nanoscale building blocks that can rearrange materials into polymers and eventually larger shapes, all from chains of repeating DNA. The material is grown from a 55-nucleotide base seed sequence, which when combined with a reaction solution, provides a liquid flow of energy to enable the DNA to synthesise new strands of its own. Further down the line the engineers are hoping that the material might be able to be programmed to avoid or be attracted to stimuli like food and light for greater longevity. The research sets the foundation to develop robots that can construct themselves, without much human involvement and could even be self-replicating…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE