Andrew Turberfield and Willaim Shih thinking about building one.

Eric Drexler's scheme

• Structural support. Large slabs of rigid protein (manufactured by self-assembly). Or out of DNA?
• Stepper motors.
  • Three steps (phases) to be able to go back and forth.
    • Actuators are molecules (like azobenzenes).
    • Control by three wavelength (visible; what is problem with UV ones? Not enough non-overlapping wavelengths I suppose was the problem).
    • Nanosecond response times.
• Material transport by diffusion.
• Material deposition by tip that activates site (catalytic).
  • To avoid a significant error rate by thermal fluctuations:
    • "large" structural components
    • larger molecular building blocks.

Oxford as one center to develop this!?

video

Questions:

Exactly how do the blocks hold together? The stepper motor surfaces should be designed to have modulatable attractice potentials, I imagine.

Predict the stochastic motion of these. How large do surfaces have to be? How fast will they move?

Slides

Talk at Martin School on Jan 2016

Notes from talk

Protein engineering

Extended structures:

Design of ordered two-dimensional arrays mediated by noncovalent protein-protein interfaces

Compact structures:

Accurate design of co-assembling multi-component protein nanomaterials

Photoswitching

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/cc/2013/c3cc46045b#!divAbstract . Allows more wavelengths to be used, including red light which is penetrates skin more.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201207602/abstract . Can now switch at nanosecond rates.

Key Challenge: Coordinated cross-disciplinary development

DOE workshop. Oxford, etc.