Ball-shaped molecules release flares when they encounter malignancy
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Cancer travels. Large tumors shed cells that move through the body and seed new malignancies. Now scientists are tinkering on the nanoscale to build unusual spheres made of DNA—a molecule that became famous as another shape, the double helix—that can find, tag and potentially kill off these tumor cells.
The spheres look a bit like toothpicks stuck in a small Styrofoam ball. The toothpicks are really a dense crowd of single DNA strands jutting out from a central core. The strands are chosen for their ability to bind to complementary DNA in cancer cells. When a bond happens, it displaces tiny light-emitting molecules stuck to the tips of the DNA in the sphere, essentially sending up a flare that indicates the presence of cancer. The brighter the flare, the more cancer DNA that is present, says Chad A. Mirkin, a chemist and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University, who has spearheaded the research.
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