Growing your own semiconductor (Image: Ken Lucas/Getty Images)

The best semiconductors are grown, not made. At least, this might one day be the case. Proteins that can build silica nanostructures on our behalf have been “evolved” in the lab. The structures could find a use in the semiconductor industry.

Luke Bawazer, now at the University of Leeds, UK, and his colleagues wondered whether proteins that evolved to help build animal skeletons could be used to grow new electronics components.

The team chose silicateins – proteins that build the silica skeletons of marine sponges – as the basis for their work. Using DNA amplification techniques, they grew millions of strands of DNA that code for silicateins. Mutations arise naturally during the process, so the final pool of DNA contained enough variation to ensure that some of the silicateins would build different kinds of mineral structures.


The researchers then attached the DNA to polystyrene microbeads and placed them in a solution containing a silicon-rich compound. Bawazer’s team was looking to select proteins that could draw silicon out of the solution to build silica structures around the beads, while still allowing access to the DNA on the surface of the bead. This would make it easy to collect and amplify the DNA that made the most promising structures. The end product? Proteins that built silica structures unlike any seen in nature.

With further evolution it should be possible to grow silica structures of the right size and shape for use in technological applications.

“It’s quite ground-breaking,” says Fiona Meldrum at the University of Leeds, UK, who was not involved in the study. Silica is the building block of semiconductors, so electronics are a natural application for such material.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1116958109