And Now, A DNA Strand Wedding Ring
That’s what a young German researcher has created for his wedding with his doctoral student bride. He has come up with possibly the world’s smallest wedding band because the rings are just eighteen nanometres. Both of them are in the Goethe University and their DNA strands have been interlocked so they are like two very minute links in a chain.
The researcher was working on a project that involved DNA and he believes that what he has created will just have to be the world’s smallest rings. The links, unlike most of the DNA architecture out there are pivotable and not fixed. He had to experiment with the DNA and that involved positioning two DNA fragments which were C-shaped pointing away from each other. Then the strands that attached the two were added. The rings are so small that they cannot be seen with a regular microscope. In fact, it would take four thousand of them to achieve that size of a human hair.
The experiments that inspired these novel wedding rings were to make these strands to become components of a molecular motor so they can be very much a part of everyday usage. These structures can also be used to study molecules like proteins which are so small that they cannot be manipulated directly.
Tags: wedding bands, wedding rings
