Towards the design of programmable self-assembled DNA-carbon nanotubes: an approach to nanobiotronics

Recently, bioelectronics has become a unique fusion of ideas leading to the development of new bio-devices, which electrically interface biological compounds such as proteins, lipids, and DNAs with electronic transducers. The major developments in this research field are biosensors and biomaterials. In addition, recent trends in interdisciplinary studies in chemistry, biology and electronics have led to a new field of research: biomolecular electronics. This promising scientific field is part of a more general approach, molecular electronics, which aims to the development of new electronic technologies, and will overcome the problem of downscaling silicon CMOS electronics faces, having the long-term goal of building a molecular computer with highly reduced feature sizes, higher performance and increased information processing capabilities. In this preliminary work, we propose a new approach for the realization of a programmable bio-molecular units that will take advantage of the self-assembly and selectivity properties of DNA molecules and the versatility of carbon nanotubes (CNT) to build scalable computing systems that will prove the feasibility of the biomolecular computer.