NanoTubes Inspired By Nature Capable Of Self Assembly

NanoTubes Inspired By Nature Capable Of Self Assembly

Out of all nano devices, nanotubesare among the most difficult to manufacture.

Such hollow tubes having diameters of only a few billionths of a meter, promise to be extremely useful, with applications ranging from delivering drugs within specific cells to fight cancer to desalinate seawater.

However, it is difficult to build nano structures and create a lot of them with the same traits, making a batch of several million nanotubes with identical diameters is even more complicated, and the challenge can not be avoided any longer because this kind of precision manufacturing is essential to create nanotechnologies of tomorrow.

Luckily, we may have a possible way to overcome the challenge.

The team of Ron Zuckermann, Nitash Balsara and Ken Downing, the Lawrence Berkeley (Berkeley Lab) National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy, has found that when polymers of a class inspired by nature are placed in water, spontaneously they reconfigured to form crystalline nano tube holes.

More importantly, the nano tubes can be adjusted so that all have the same diameter of between 5 and 10 nano meters, depending on the length of the polymer chain.

Berkeley Lab scientists discovered a peptoid composed of two chemically distinct blocks (shown in orange and in  blue) that self assembles in the form of nanotubeswith uniform diameters. (Image: Berkeley Lab)

Polymers have two chemically distinct blocks having the same size and shape. The scientists found that these blocks act as molecular tiles that form rings which are joined together to form nano tubes to 100 nano-meters long, all with the same diameter.

This offers the industry a new way of using synthetic polymers to create complex nano-structures in a very precise way.

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