Introduction
We control individual molecules much in the same way one can control macroscopic (“traditional”) robots. Well, not really in the same way: we control molecular movement by carefully programming interactions between molecules and landscapes they traverse. Our molecules are nucleic acids, but, within the next several years, we hope to expand our approach to other chemical systems.
We know, it sounds mysterious. But we hope within the next few years to publish many more papers describing our collaborative efforts (for recent publications and updates, please see 
). In the meantime, you can enjoy reading a brief popular description of our research () or you can read everything ( ) about our most advanced landscape, molecular origami, as this work has already been published by one of our principal investigators, and it helped winning some prestigious
awards (e.g., MacArthur Awards , and Feynman Awards ).
We are a group of scientists from many disciplines that work together
on this interesting problem. Our full list of collaborators is also
available (please see
).
Finally, we want to thank the National Science Foundation (mostly CISE Directorate) for supporting our members over many years in the high-risk research that eventually culminated with our proposal to start experiments in actual molecular robotics. The establishment of our Center was funded through the Chemical Bonding Center grant (CHE-0514006) from the Chemistry Division of the National Science Foundation.
