What is molecular engineering?
It’s engineering molecules, or better yet, engineering with molecules. Normally the object of scientific inquiries, molecules—their chemical, physical, and structural properties—are the foundation for entirely new engineering technologies and for optimizing existing ones.
Engineering with molecules means selecting molecules with the right properties, then organizing them into some nanoscale level structure, that is, designing the right molecular architecture to achieve the desired product or process. Nature creates molecular architectures in many ways, too, for example, through DNA structure and protein folding. In these cases, molecular engineering seeks to understand these nanoscale architectures to develop ways to mimic and improve upon them.
It’s more than being small. All engineering disciplines have their important equations in which one can substitute ever decreasing length scales to solve them. At the nanoscale level, these equations break down: either by giving non-sensical solutions, or by giving none at all.
At the molecular and nanoscale level, substances exhibit unique properties not seen in their macroscopic forms. This comes about through a variety of effects as shown in the table below.
Read about how UW researchers are finding tiny solutions to big problems using molecular engineering.