Biology Meets Typography With DNA Sans - hydesith1974

[Credit: Peng Yin, William Jennings Bryan Wei, and Mingjie Dai]

DNA is jolly incredible stuff, but who thought information technology could be upside-down into a baptistry–and combined that's still nicer than Comic Sans at that?

Trine Harvard University Medical School students–Peng Yin, Bryan Wei, and Mingjie Dai–created the font, nicknamed DNA Sans, aside using DNA "tiles." These tiles, like diminutive canvases, allow each single string of Deoxyribonucleic acid to fold into a perpendicular tile. When the tiles are mixed together, they stick to each other and form something that resembles a little brick wall.

So how does a tiny brick fence in form all the shapes needed for a font? Arsenic a wall, the tiles are bad tiny–each is around 64-by-103 nanometers in sized. The team disclosed that it could construct complex shapes by merely leaving KO'd specific tiles. From there, the researchers made 107 two-dimensional shapes comprising of numbers pool, letters, Chinese characters, symbols, and random objects, like an eagle's head and smiley human face. They were also able to make different sized tiles victimization this method acting.

The tile jut proved that you don't need long scaffolds to create DNA structures. Preceding work required scaffolds for the structure to retain its shape, because new sets of strands were required for to each one structure. With the tiles technique, you can utilization the same set repeatedly, collectible to the way tiles are left out–you just want to pick molecules carefully. The team created a robot to perform this task–the bot can piece the tiles and mix the required strands for each shape.

It's jolly fascinating stuff, really. Course, you South Korean won't be seeing DNA Sans in the next edition of Microsoft Word, but it will be interesting to see how other the triplet's technique can be used.

Check out Discover Magazine's spot made entirely outgoing of Desoxyribonucleic acid Sans. You can see the full work and detailed explanation of the research team's method acting published on Nature.

[Nature Word via Gizmodo]