Imagine you want to build an intricate work of architecture, like a castle.

Now imagine that, once all its individual components are brought together, the castle builds itself automatically. Finally, imagine this castle is so small that it’s measured on the same scale as DNA, viruses and small molecules.

You’ve just entered the nanoscale world where Eric Henderson lives. And if this sounds like magic to you, maybe you’re not far off the mark.

“It’s the magic of how DNA works,” said Henderson, a professor of genetics, development and cell biology at Iowa State University.

Henderson, along with his former graduate student Divita Mathur, studies how to build nanomachines that may have real-world medical applications someday soon. He and Mathur recently published an article in the peer-reviewed Scientific Reports describing his laboratory’s successful effort to design a nanomachine capable of detecting a mockup of the Ebola virus.

Read more at Iowa State University

Learn more at Nano.gov Act Now