Science Daily May 23, 2019 The global spread of antibiotic resistance is a major public health issue. The spread of antibiotic resistance is for the most part due to the capacity of bacteria to exchange genetic material through a process known as bacterial conjugation. The ability of the bacterium to expel the antibiotic before it can exert its destructive effect using “efflux pumps” found on its membrane. Experimenting with E. Coli researchers in France have revealed that in just 1 to 2 hours, the single-stranded DNA fragment of the efflux pump was transformed into double-stranded DNA and then translated into […]
Category Archives: Biotechnology
Scientists Have Found a Way to Preserve Vaccines Without Refrigeration For Months
Science Alert May 26, 2019 While other tactics have focused on reengineering the vaccines or modifying their vectors, new method invented by researchers in Canada is based on the simple addition of sugar. The viruses are mixed and then dried into a sugary film, created from a combination of two FDA-approved food preservatives, called pullulan and trehalose. Suspended in this solution, the vaccines can be transported without the need for constant cooling. To reactive them, local clinicians need only add water before administering them to patients, as fresh as if they came from a fridge. So far, the effectiveness has […]
Biosensor ‘bandage’ collects and analyzes sweat
Science Daily April 17, 2019 An international team of researchers (China, USA – Caltech, UC Davis) demonstrates a flexible and skin-mounted band that combines superhydrophobic-superhydrophilic microarrays with nanodendritic colorimetric biosensors toward in situ sweat sampling and analysis. On the superwettable bands, the superhydrophobic background could confine microdroplets into superhydrophilic microwells. The secreted sweat is repelled by the superhydrophobic silica coating and precisely collected and sampled onto the superhydrophilic micropatterns which provides an independent “vessel” toward cellphone-based sweat biodetection. Such wearable, superwettable band-based biosensors could significantly enhance epidemical sweat sampling in well-defined sites, holding promise for facile and noninvasive biofluids analysis…read […]
Bioengineers program cells as digital signal processors
Science Daily April 18, 2019 Through cooperative self-assembly, multivalent transcription factor complexes perform non-linear regulatory operations involved in cellular decision-making and signal processing. Using this principle, a team of researchers in the US (Rice University, BU, Brandeis University, MIT, Harvard University) shows that specifying strength and number of assembly subunits enables predictive tuning between linear and non-linear regulatory response for single- and multi-input circuits. They harnessed this capability to engineer circuits that perform dynamic filtering, enabling frequency-dependent decoding in cell populations. Programmable cooperative assembly provides a versatile way to tune nonlinearity of network connections, dramatically expanding the engineerable behaviors available […]
‘Biological bandage’ could help heal wounds
Nanowerk March 28, 2019 Fibrinogen is a blood protein which through self-organization process turns dissolved proteins into ultrafine fibers that then combine to form tissue. Researchers in Germany introduced a novel biofabrication technique to prepare three-dimensional, nanofibrous fibrinogen scaffolds by salt-induced self-assembly. They were able to fabricate either free-standing or immobilized fibrinogen scaffolds on demand by tailoring the underlying substrate material and adding a fixation and washing procedure after the fiber assembly. Thickness can be adjusted by altering the salt concentration. The possibility to choose between free-standing and immobilized scaffolds makes the process attractive for the preparation of versatile tissue […]
Capturing bacteria that eat and breathe electricity
Science Daily March 5, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (Washington State University, Montana State University) developed a battery-operated potentiostat that is capable of controlling the potential of a working electrode and can be deployed and operated remotely, allowing the enrichment of electrochemically active microorganisms on electrodes in their native environment. The device was tested in four alkaline hot springs with a temperature ranging from 45 οC to 91 οC and a relatively constant pH of 8.5–8.7. Analysis showed a change in microbial community structure after 32 days of polarization. The impact of polarization was most substantial on […]
Switch-in-a-cell electrifies life
Science Daily December 17, 2018 In a cell, proteins evolve that can respond to a single prompt in a sea of information. Natural proteins that move electrons more or less act as wires that are always there. To leverage this ability of the proteins, a team of researchers in the US (Rice University, Boston University) made a proof-of-concept metal-containing proteins. They embedded it in E. coli and introduced 4-hydroxytamoxifen, an estrogen receptor modulator to express the protein and thus were able to turn on the switch in the presence of the chemical or off in its absence. The proteins could […]
Physicists design new antenna for next-generation super-sensitive magnetometers
Phys.org November 6, 2018 Ensembles of nitrogen-vacancy color centers in diamond hold promise for ultra-precise magnetometery, competing with superconducting quantum interference device detectors. By utilizing the advantages of dielectric materials, such as very low losses for electromagnetic field, with the potential for creating high-quality factor resonators with strong concentration of the field within it, researchers in Russia implemented a dielectric resonator antenna for coherent manipulation of a large ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond. Research enables use of large volume low nitrogen-vacancy concentration diamond plates in modern nitrogen-vacancy magnetometers thus improving sensitivity via larger coherence time and higher optical detected […]
Researchers design ‘smart’ surfaces to repel everything but targeted beneficial exceptions
Science Daily October 24, 2018 Researchers in Canada have developed a new class of lubricant-infused surfaces that offer tunable bioactivity together with omniphobic properties by integrating biofunctional domains into the lubricant-infused layer. They created surfaces highly tunable that bind to particular antibodies while repelling nonspecific adhesion of undesirable proteins and cells not only in buffer but also in human plasma or human whole blood to demonstrate how it is beneficial in biomedical implants. The method creates biofunctional, nonstick surfaces that can be used to optimize the performance of devices such as biomedical implants, extracorporeal circuits, and biosensors… read more. TECHNICAL […]
Glow-in-the-dark paper as a rapid test for infectious diseases
Science Daily October 3, 2018 An international team of researchers (Japan, the Netherlands) has developed microfluidic paper‐based analytical devices (μPADs) based on bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) switches for analyte recognition and colorimetric signal generation. They use BRET‐based antibody sensing proteins integrated into vertically assembled layers of functionalized paper, fully reagent‐free operation, including on‐device blood plasma separation. It takes about 20 minutes and a drop of blood to test the sample for anti-bodies. The device is ideally suited for user‐friendly point‐of‐care testing in low‐resource environments…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE