A PAIR of tweezers that can pick up one molecule at a time has been designed by Japanese researchers. The molecular tweezers grip the molecule tightly but spring open when exposed to ultraviolet light. Such a device might carry drugs across a cell membrane and release them on command.
Michinori Takeshita and his colleagues at the Institute of Advanced Material Study at Kyushu University describe in the current issue of
Other researchers have already designed various molecular traps that can carry a molecule to target cells. But most rely on chemical triggers which are not instantaneous, such as a fall in
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