Wednesday August 9 3:43 PM ET DNA Motors Promise Faster, Smaller Electronics Reuters Photo By Bill Rosato LONDON (Reuters) - An international team of scientists said Wednesday it had made the world's first DNA motors, paving the way for molecular electronic circuits thousands of times faster and smaller than silicon chips. ``You would have much smaller and faster computers. For the same surface area you could fit in some 10,000 times more components and you could make three dimensional arrangements,'' Bernard Yurke, from Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, told Reuters. DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the genetic material inside the nucleus of a cell that carries instructions for making living things. The DNA motors, which assemble themselves, pave the way for the development of minute electronic systems composed of molecular switches and other elements which could be produced by mixing the components in a test-tube, Yurke and Andrew Turberfield, a physicist at the University of Oxford, said. Single-strands of DNA will only bind to other DNA strands that have a complementary sequence of molecules on their surface to form the stable double-stranded helix. Hence a DNA ``tweezer'' was assembled by the simple expedient of mixing three specially designed single strands of DNA in a test-tube. Each single strand then found its complementary partner and attached itself to it forming a V-shaped structure 100,000 times smaller than the head of a pin, the scientists said in the journal Nature. Tweezer Is Forerunner To Molecular Computers Turberfield described how the ``tweezer'' knowledge could pave the way for molecular electronic circuits. ``The idea is that you add DNA tags to each molecular component -- then you mix them in a pot, complementary tags find each other and an ordered, designed device assembles itself,'' Turberfield, who spent a sabbatical year at Bell Labs, said. The DNA ``tweezers'' can open and close by using a ``fuel'' strand which binds to the single-stranded DNA dangling from the ends of the arms of the tweezers and zips them closed. The scientists also engineered a removal strand that pulls the ``fuel'' strand away from the ``tweezers'' and opens them. At the moment the only two things standing in the way of the production of molecular devices with practical applications were the technology to assemble molecular components, which the ''tweezers'' knowledge should overcome, and molecules that act as transistors, Yurke said. Researchers have already created molecular wires, logic gates (a building block of computers) and switches, which could be hooked up to make a working computer a fraction of the size of ones based on silicon chips. The development of molecular circuits was essential, Turberfield said. ``Something has to be done to revolutionize electronic circuit assembly because conventional processes are going to run into a brick wall within the next 10 to 20 years,'' he said.