Nanowerk March 22, 2023 Current tissue engineering approaches combine different scaffold materials with living cells to provide biological substitutes that can repair and eventually improve tissue functions. Both natural and synthetic materials have been fabricated for transplantation of stem cells and their specific differentiation into muscles, bones, and cartilages. One of the key objectives for bone regeneration therapy to be successful is to direct stem cells’ proliferation and to accelerate their differentiation in a controlled manner using growth factors and osteogenic inducers. An international team of researchers (Singapore, South Korea) has shown that graphene provides a promising biocompatible scaffold that […]
Tag Archives: Bioengineering
Light accelerates conductivity in nature’s ‘electric grid’
Nanowerk September 7, 2022 Almost all living things breathe oxygen to get rid of excess electrons when converting nutrients into energy. Without access to oxygen, however, soil bacteria living deep under oceans or buried underground respire by “breathing minerals,” through tiny protein nanowires. Researchers at Yale University found that exposing bacteria-produced nanowires to light yielded up to a 100-fold increase in electrical conductivity showing stable and robust photocurrent that persists for hours. They showed that living biofilms of Geobacter sulfurreducens used nanowires of cytochrome OmcS as intrinsic photoconductors. Photocurrents respond rapidly (<100 ms) to the excitation and persist reversibly for hours. […]
Bacterial nanopores open the future of data storage
Nanowerk December 14, 2020 The recent development of polymers that can store information at the molecular level has opened new opportunities for ultrahigh density data storage, long-term archival, anticounterfeiting systems, and molecular cryptography. However, synthetic informational polymers are so far only deciphered by tandem mass spectrometry. In comparison, nanopore technology can be faster, cheaper, nondestructive and provide detection at the single-molecule level; moreover, it can be massively parallelized and miniaturized in portable devices. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, France, Brazil) has demonstrated the ability of engineered aerolysin nanopores to accurately read, with single-bit resolution, the digital information encoded in […]
How fungi grow: A movie from inside the cell
Science Daily March 15, 2018 Fungi are used to produce food or medicine and in bioengineering. Using high-performance light microscopy, an international team of researchers (Germany, Greece, Belgium, USA – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Japan) watched mold fungi as they grew in the cell. Mold fungi are hyphal fungi consisting of filamentous cells, hyphae, which may form large networks, mycelia. The hyphae of about 3 µm in thickness exclusively grow by directed extension of their tips. An important objective of biological fundamental research is to understand this growth on the molecular level, as hyphal growth plays an important role […]