The idea to use chemically activated vesicles for the degradation of toxins in waste areas is rather obvious. But as long as the whole area must be covered with such mini-reactors, many questions, not the least economical ones, remain open. The situation changes as soon as these reactors become mobile. Then, working with ecologically and economically reasonable amounts of agents may be sufficient to achieve the necessary level of "cleaning". We believe that there are several possible fields of applications e.g. environmental remediation or medicine, but we know not enough to make reliable statements about the effective applicability of mobile multi-vesicular systems. We emphasize that such applications require considerable R&D; efforts, but, of course, offer also considerable economical benefit.
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Vesicular nanorobots and chemical micro fabs
Fig. 1 a-e
a) Distribution of a multi-step reaction on several compartments: This enables to choose optimal conditions for the individual processes and prohibits unwanted interactions between different processes. This at the cost of having the necessity to organize the material transport between the vesicles. b) Vesicles can be coupled selectively either to each other (shown here) or to a substrate. This allows the construction of spatially structured vesicle assemblies. c) Based on the fact that vesicles enable a direct interaction between membrane-soluble and water-soluble substances, already homogeneous multi-vesicle reactors are of technological interest. But we want to go further: d) shows structures that are composed of several vesicle types and finally e) in which the vesicles are arranged according to specific correlations (Here pictorially: Red and blue vesicles are not in direct contact and don't (directly) exchange material (see reaction scheme in 1a). In order to obtain such patterns, we need the selective coupling illustrated in 1b. Fig. 1b: sequence specific coupling, realized at the AILab by DNA-DNA-linkers, in future DNA-PNA-constructs. Realization by Prof. Peter Eggenberger and Maik Hadorn, figure 1b by Maik Hadorn.
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