Using a biphenyl crown ether, you can read the programmed stereochemistry in a molecular tape like a kind of Turing machine, British researchers show in Nature.

David Leigh’s group from the University of Manchester compares the way a cell processes information to a Turing machine. Such a machine reads sequences of information and assigns a value for each character read. This should also be possible at the molecular level, Leigh must have thought. In any case, the publication in Nature shows something similar.

Leigh and his colleagues Yansong Ren, Romain Jamagne and Daniel Tetlow designed a ‘nanomachine’ (as they call it) that you power with acids, bases and some small molecules. The machine consists of a molecular tape with different reading points, and a reading head in the shape of a crown ether.