Highlights included new schemes for wiring molecular electronic devices and genetically-engineered proteins that assemble materials. Biological organisms aren t just master builders of soft and squishy organic materials. Of course, the secret behind such synthetic feats is the soft, squishy proteins that both clams and people have evolved to help organize inorganic molecules into intricate and useful patterns. Now materials researchers are trying to use the same trick as well. If the same protein-engineering techniques can generate molecules capable of organizing and patterning a wide variety of materials, proteins could become invaluable tools for crafting transistors, wires, and other electronic devices with components hundreds of times smaller than those on current computer chips.
Organic systems have molecular recognition abilities that have had a long time to evolve.
Such naturally occurring proteins don t work well with many industrially important materials such as metals and semiconductors, however. So the Washington and Texas researchers decided to see if they could improve matters. For their part, Sarikaya and his Washington colleagues set out to coax bacterial proteins into binding to gold, which is used widely in the electronics industry. Escherichia coli that does not bind gold in its natural form. They then cloned the multiporin gene to make millions of copies.