Nanotechnology is perfectly realized in biological systems. Cells are essentially biological assemblers that build thousands of custom-designed molecules and construct new assemblers. In Bionanotechnology, structural biologist David Goodsell describes what biology can teach us about engineering and manufacturing at the nanometre scale. Goodsell kicks off with an introduction to the history of nanotechnology, which was pioneered by Richard Feynman and widely popularized by Eric Drexler's evocative idea of a self-replicating assembler building nanoscale devices atom by atom. He then takes a detailed look at the composition and structural principles of biomolecules harnessed in the cell, describing numerous bionanomachines in action, ranging from proteins, nucleic acids and membranes, to enzyme catalysis, the machinery of DNA transcription and translation, and biomolec-ular motors.
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