A scientist at Weill Cornell Medicine – Qatar (WCM-Q) has created the world’s smallest drill – 50,000 times smaller than the breadth of a human hair.

The drill, which measures just two nanometres long, has been created and analysed by Dr Mohamed Yousef, associate professor of physics at WCMQ, in collaboration with an international team of scientists
from the University of Oregon, UT Southwestern Medical Centre, the Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

The product of a decade of research, the nano-drill has been engineered from a section of protein and may have potential applications in the delivery of drugs to targeted areas within the human body.
The research team behind the drill was initially concerned with proteins and why they are structured in the way they are.

But in the course of that work they discovered the potential to re-purpose a protein for alternative uses. Using a protein that in nature eats up bacterial cell walls, the team engineered a section of it to act in a different way. Dr Yousef, who is the lead author of the nano-drill research paper, said, “The protein’s structure had a “spring” at the surface which made it an ideal candidate for this work.

Source https://img.gulf-times.com/Content/PDF/Dailynewspaper/Main2020_3_10639833.PDF

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