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| Molecular medicine, bioinformatics and biomolecular nanotechnology are rapidly increasing our ability to heal and stay healthy. The other field in which molecular scale manipulation of matter is receiving abundant attention is medicine. Since all living organisms are composed of molecules, molecular biology has become the primary focus of biotechnology. Countless diseases have been cured by our ability to synthesize small molecules commonly know as 'drugs' that interact with the protein molecules that make up the molecular machinery that keeps us alive. Our understanding of how proteins interact with DNA, phospholipids and other biological molecules is what allows such progress. Living systems are able to live because of the vast amount of highly ordered molecular machinery from which they are built. The central dogma of molecular biology states that the information required to build a living cell or organism is stored in the DNA (which was described above for its use in molecular computation). This information is transferred from the DNA to the proteins by the processes called transcription and translation. These processes are all executed by various biomolecular components, mostly protein and nucleic acids. Molecular biology is a field in which the study of these interactions has led to the discovery of numerous pharmaceuticals that have been enormously effective in curing disease. Understanding of molecular mechanisms including substrate recognition, energy expenditure, electron transport, membrane activity and much more have greatly improved our medical technology. So, what does this have to do with nanotechnology? First of all it shows the abilities of molecular scale machinery. Since the goal of nanotechnology is molecular and atomic precision, nanotechnology has much (if not everything) to learn from nature. Copying, borrowing and learning tricks from nature is one of the primary techniques used by nanotechnology and has been termed biomimetics. Secondly, our ability to design synthetic, semi-synthetic and natural molecular machinery gives us an enormous potential for curing disease and preserving life. An extensive textbook titled Nanomedicine has been written and does an excellent job of summarizing how nanotechnology is changing medicine. |
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