Let a Thousand DNA Flowers Bloom

By KIM BELLARD When I saw a headline about “DNA flowers,” I was nonplused. I mean: aren’t all flowers made out of DNA, like every living thing on our planet? Well, it turns out that the DNA flowers are actually soft robots – make that nanobots – so my interest was definitely piqued. The DNA flowers are out of the Freeman Lab at the University of North Carolina, led by Dr. Ronit Freeman, and the research about them was just published in Nature Nanotechnology with the less sexy title “Reversible metamorphosis of hierarchical DNA-organic crystal.”  Had I seen that before “DNA flowers” I