Â鶹´«Ã½

Viruses may soon be recruited by chip makers in the quest to take computer chips down to the nanometre scale and harness novel quantum effects. Angela Belcher and her team at the University of Texas at Austin genetically engineered viruses so they have a string of amino acids at one end that has an affinity for zinc sulphide. When added to a solution of the chemical, the viruses ended up with tiny clusters of the material stuck to them. Drying out droplets of solution made the viruses line up in rows, side by side. The rows then aligned top to bottom with other rows to build up a thin sheet populated with regularly spaced quantum dots (Science, vol 296, p 892). Belcher, who succeeded in growing quantum dots in bacteria last year (Â鶹´«Ã½, 23 June 2001, p 20), says her next challenge is to wire the dots together into useful circuits.