Nanobiotechnology refers to the ways that nanotechnology is used to create devices to study biological systems.
The prefix “nano” derives from the Greek word for dwarf. One nanometer (nm) is equal to one-billionth of a meter, or about the width of 6 carbon atoms or 10 water molecules.
The development of nanoscience can be traced to the time of the Greeks and Democritus in the 5th century B.C., when scientists considered the question of whether matter is continuous, and thus infinitely divisible into smaller pieces, or composed of small, indivisible and indestructible particles, which scientists now call atoms.
The concept of a ‘‘nanometer’’ was first proposed by Richard Zsigmondy, the 1925 Nobel Prize Laureate in chemistry. He coined the term nanometer explicitly for characterizing particle size.
The American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman introduce the concept of nanotechnology in 1959. During the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, Feynman presented a lecture entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)’, in which he introduced the concept of manipulating matter at the atomic level.
Lecture by Feynman was inspired by the continual progress in reaching lower and lower temperatures and achieving of higher and higher vacuum. Both fields seemed to be “bottomless”. Feynman generalized this observation towards the manipulating and controlling things at ever smaller scale.
After fifteen years, Norio Taniguchi, a Japanese scientist was the first to use and define the term “nanotechnology” in 1974 as: “nanotechnology mainly consists of the processing of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule”.
In the mid-1980s, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation in 1986, a popular treatment of the promises and potentials of nanotechnology. Drexler envisioned a molecular nanotechnology discipline that would allow manufactures to fabricate products from the bottom up with precise molecular control.
Today, nanotechnology impacts human life every day. Association of these two technologies (nanotechnology and biotechnology), i.e., nanobiotechnology can play a vital role in developing and implementing many useful tools in the study of life.
Advances in the manipulation of the nanomaterials permit the binding of different biomolecules, such as bacteria, toxins, proteins, and nucleic acids. Nanobiotechnologies have become well appreciated in recent times due to the fact that nanostructures could be utilized as delivery agents by encapsulating drugs or attaching therapeutic drugs and deliver them to target tissues more precisely with a controlled release. Nanobiotechnology, is an emerging field implementing the use of knowledge and techniques of nanoscience in medical biology and disease prevention and remediation.
Nanobiotechnology in history
