Caltech researchers have built a prototype nanobot out of DNA, Popular Mechanics reports.
The nanobot has three main components, it says: a leg, an arm, and a sensor. The leg, which has two feet, allows the bot to move, while the arm can grab onto dye and the sensor then lets it know when to release the dye. Popular Mechanics notes that if the nanobot can be programmed to move around dye, it could be programmed to do all sorts of things.
"Though we demonstrated a robot for this specific task, the same system design can be generalized to work with dozens of types of cargos at any arbitrary initial location on the surface," Caltech's Anupama Thubagere tells Popular Mechanics. "One could also have multiple robots performing diverse sorting tasks in parallel."
Popular Mechanics adds that one of the hopes for DNA nanobots is that they could be sent into dominions people cannot enter, such as the bloodstream, or could be used to synthesize chemicals at the molecular level.