MIT professor Angela M. Belcher has altered the DNA in a virus to generate a variety of self-assembling, regular nanowires made of magnetic and semiconducting materials that may one day be part of the extremely small circuitry in the next generation of ever-shrinking high-speed electronic components.

Dr. Belcher has jointly founded a company, Semzyme, with Evelyn L. Hu, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara, to try to bring the technology to the marketplace.