Batman uses human-enhancement technologies to fight crime because he loathes injustice, while the Joker uses them to wreak mayhem because he’s a psychopath. You might think the answer would depend on each individual’s moral compass. Which raises an important question: If humans become superhuman, will we turn out to be superheroes-or supervillains? In other words: Nature will always seek to spend as little energy as possible.From invisibility to superhuman strength to telekinesis, a wave of emerging technologies promise to give people powers once reserved for comic-book characters. 'The answer is energy: the chiral world requires the lowest energy to maintain, therefore it is most stable,' says Hanbin Mao. The researchers report to be the first to provide an answer to why the biological world is chiral: So why do we have a left and a right hand? 'This is the first study to show that the chirality of DNA and peptide structures can communicate and interact, when their handedness is changed,' says Chenguang Lou. They have changed the peptide chirality from left to right, so it fits with the chirality of the DNA and works with it instead of repelling it. This is what the research team has done tricked the chirality. You can only do this if you can trick your two hands into having the same chirality,' says Hanbin Mao. You will find out it is impossible to do it.

'Imagine you want to stack your two hands by matching each finger while both palms face the same direction. DNA is always right-handed and peptides are always left-handed, so trying to combine them is a highly challenging task. One possible reason for this is their so-called chirality - sometimes also described as handedness.Īll biological structures, from molecules to the human body, have a fixed chirality think of our heart, which is always positioned in the left side of our body. In Nature, they often behave like cats and dogs, though some key interactions are essential to any living organisms.

It is rare in Nature that DNA and peptide structures are chemically linked like this new structure is. The research work reports the mechanical properties of a new structure composed of three-stranded DNA structures and three-stranded peptide structures. 'Our next step will be to investigate whether it can be used to explain the cause of Alzheimer's disease in which malfunctional peptides are culprits,' says the other corresponding author, Hanbin Mao, professor at Chemistry and Biochemistry, Kent State University. 'If you combine these two, as we have, you get a very powerful molecular tool, that may lead to the next generation of nanotechnology it may allow us to make more advanced nanostructures, for example, for detecting diseases,' says corresponding author Chenguang Lou, associate professor at Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark.Īccording to the researchers, another example is that this marriage of peptides to DNA can be used to create artificial proteins, which will be more stable and thus more reliable to work with than natural proteins, which are vulnerable to heat, UV, chemical reagents, etc.

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