Lego robot used to make DNA structures for tiny machines more quickly

A robot fabricated from Lego can quickly carry out an necessary step for creating machines fabricated from DNA.

“This started as a final project in an undergraduate lab course,” says Rizal Hariadi at Arizona State University, who tasked his class with constructing instruments utilizing “frugal science”.

The robot that one group of scholars constructed has proved notably helpful and resembles a single arm topped with a holder for cylindrical tubes. It performs a process to combine the liquid contents of the tubes, first tilting the tubes from vertical to horizontal, then quickly spinning them round. This creates a single liquid with a density that uniformly decreases from the underside to the highest.

The robot’s elements, together with gears, connecting blocks and two motors, all come from Lego kits. The solely exception is the tube holder that the researchers had to 3D print. The robot’s design is a smaller and sooner model of more conventional “gradient mixers”.

After being blended by the Lego robot, the liquid may be used for purifying tiny structures fabricated from DNA molecules that researchers like Hariadi need to use as tiny machines. These machines may each perform duties within cells and shed new mild on how naturally occurring molecular machines, like proteins, work.

Many standard strategies for creating density gradients require hard-to-use and costly machines. The Lego robot created the mandatory density gradient in only one minute, which speeds up the purification total.

Katherine Dunn on the University of Edinburgh within the UK says the robot may make the purification course of each cheaper and faster.

The purification process consists of gadgets aside from the Lego robot, so the robot itself is probably not of use to different laboratories that don’t have already got this remaining gear, says Hariadi . However, as a result of it solely price about $350 to make it out of Lego – store-bought gadgets vary from $500 and $5000  – this can be a handy and accessible means to prototype gadgets that may enhance present lab routines, he says.