An Update on “Fantastic Voyage”
Imagine gold nanoparticles to which long and short sequences of DNA are attached. The large sequences are receptors for pathogenic organisms; the short ones carry a fluorescent reporter molecule. When this structure encounters a pathogen, the long strands cut off the short one, thereby activating the fluorescent reporter. Now suppose these particles float through the vascular system like the characters in Harry Kleiner’s 1966 sci-fi movie “Fantastic Voyage.” Roughly speaking, this is what scientists at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario) have created, and taking the sci-fi a step further, they imagine their “Nubots” (for nucleic acid robots) one day swimming through blood to latch onto microRNA fragments which indicate cancers. MORE
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