Building molecular machine systems

摘要

Compared with conventional technologies, many natural molecular machines systems display tremendous abilities. The molecular machinery of green plants, for example, converts more energy and synthesizes a greater tonnage of organic compounds than does humanity's entire chemical industry, and does so cleanly and by using cheap raw materials. At a conservative megabyte or so per genome, the digital storage capacity of the millions of bacteria in the dirt on a typical computer far exceeds that of the advertised components. Although we spend billions of dollars on dense digital storage systems, nature places far denser systems in the same boxes free of charge, but unintended and unusable.