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York share in £9m to make structures for biological minutiae

Posted on 15 June 2001

Biologists at the University of York have a share of a £9M Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration grant into 'Bionanotechnology'.

The essence of this research is to make and use structures at the nanometre (nm) scale (1 nm = a billionth of a metre, that is, one ten thousandth of the diameter of a human hair). It's a multi-disciplinary field involving materials scientists, chemists, physicists, biochemists, molecular biologists, engineers and applied mathematicians.

The enormous advances made during the last twenty years mean that the tools to make and measure minute objects on the molecular scale have become available. We will now begin to see extraordinary advances in manufacturing using these tools: computers will shrink, medical diagnosis and treatment will be almost instantaneous and non-invasive, energy wastage will be dramatically reduced and our environment will become increasingly clean. The UK must maintain a leading role in defining this new technology, which is why the setting up of these collaborations is so significant.

The research work at York is part of an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in 'Bionanotechnology' led by Oxford University, with the Universities of Glasgow and York, and the National Institute for Medical Research. The consortium is funded by three of the Government's Science Research Councils (EPSRC and BBSRC based in Swindon, and MRC based in London) and the Ministry of Defence.

The consortium is directed by Professor John Ryan, who is currently Head of the Oxford Physics department. Dr Justin Molloy, a Reader in Biology, is heading York's contribution to the research.

"Biological materials, such as proteins and DNA have many remarkable advantages;" said Professor Ryan, "they undergo highly controlled assembly on an atom by atom basis, which makes them ideal for applications in nanotechnology"

"If it bites, it's biology! - We all know that movement is fundamental to living things; right from a cell's ability to replicate its DNA and to divide all the way to the huge forces that are produced by muscle contraction." Said Dr Justin Molloy at York "The molecules in your body that convert chemical fuel (obtained from food) to mechanical work are generally called Molecular Motors and these protein machines work at the level of a single molecule (that is just 10nm long) - in a sense they are quantum devices since one molecule of fuel gives exactly one mechanical impulse." Molloy concluded that "to date, few man-made devices come close to what nature has achieved and we now need to build machines on the nanometre scale using ideas, principles and materials that we can plunder from biology".