Lifeboat Foundation

Self-propelled nanoparticles could potentially advance drug delivery and lab-on-a-chip systems — but they are prone to go rogue with random, directionless movements. Now, an international team of researchers has developed an approach to rein in the synthetic particles.

Led by Igor Aronson, the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry and Mathematics at Penn State, the team redesigned the nanoparticles into a propeller shape to better control their movements and increase their functionality. They published their results in the journal Small (“Multifunctional Chiral Chemically-Powered Micropropellers for Cargo Transport and Manipulation”).

A propeller-shaped nanoparticle spins counterclockwise, triggered by a chemical reaction with hydrogen peroxide, followed by an upward movement, triggered by a magnetic field. The optimized shape of these particles allows researchers to better control the nanoparticles’ movements and to pick up and move cargo particles. (Video: Active Biomaterials Lab)

A team of chemists, microbiologists and physicists at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. has developed a way to use solid-state nanopores and multiplexed DNA barcoding to identify misfolded proteins such as those involved in neurodegenerative disorders in blood samples. In their study, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the group used multiplexed DNA barcoding techniques to overcome problems with nanopore filtering techniques for isolating harmful oligomers.

Prior research has shown that the presence of harmful oligomers in the brain can lead to misfolding of proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. Medical researchers have been looking for a way to detect them in the blood as a way to diagnose neurodegenerative disease and to track the progression once it has been confirmed.

Unfortunately, finding them in complex mixtures such as blood has proven to be a daunting task. One approach has shown promise—using nanopore sensors—but to date, they cannot track target oligomers as they speed through customizable solid-state nanopore sensors. In this new effort, the research team overcame this problem by using customizable DNA nanostructures.

There’s an unfortunate irony in cell therapy that holds it back from its full potential: Regenerating tissues often must be damaged to know if the treatment is working, such as surgically removing tissue to see if rejuvenation is occurring beneath.

The alternative isn’t much better: Patients can choose to wait and see if their health improves, but after weeks of uncertainty, they might find that no healing has taken place without a clear explanation as to why.

Jinhwan Kim, a new assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Davis, who holds a joint appointment with the Department of Surgery at UC Davis Health, wants to change all of that. In his research program, he combines nanotechnology and novel bioimaging techniques to provide non-invasive, real-time monitoring of cellular function and health.

I’ve been studying this topic for use in a story I’m working on and I’ve come across various videos and interviews on the topic, but they all seem mostly concerned with assembly of larger objects.

I was just curious if the same actions that would assemble an object could be reversed to disassemble it, or if there were other necessary actions that needed to be taken. I understand that energy needs to be put in to break a molecular bond, so is that something that would have to be taken into account as well?

Also, as a side note, the current idea is to have the nanobots be mostly carbon constructs, if that affects the way things work.

On the highway of heat transfer, thermal energy is moved by way of quantum particles called phonons. But at the nanoscale of today’s most cutting-edge semiconductors, those phonons don’t remove enough heat. That’s why Purdue University researchers are focused on opening a new nanoscale lane on the heat transfer highway by using hybrid quasiparticles called “polaritons.” Credit: Purdue University photo/DALL-E.

An international team of scientists has collaborated to develop a new DNA-based nanobot that can self-replicate indefinitely under the right conditions.

A new study has been published showcasing a new DNA-based nanobot that could open the door to producing life-saving drugs in the human body.

A team of researchers based at the University of Toronto’s (U of T) Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy has discovered a novel ionizable lipid nanoparticle that enables muscle-focused mRNA delivery while minimizing off-target delivery to other tissues. The team also showed that mRNA delivered by the lipid nanoparticles investigated in their study triggered potent cellular-level immune responses as a proof-of-concept melanoma cancer vaccine.

The study, led by Bowen Li, assistant professor, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, U of T, was published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Called iso-A11B5C1, the new lipid nanoparticle demonstrates exceptional mRNA delivery efficiency in muscle tissues while also minimizing unintended mRNA translation in organs such as the liver and spleen.

A team of researchers has reviewed a unique method for reforming the structures of ultra-small nanomaterials. These nanomaterials, called metal nanoclusters, bridge the gap between the metal atom and the bulk metal, making them highly useful in both basic and applied research. Metal nanoclusters have the potential for wide-ranging applications in the biomedical fields.

The team’s review paper is published in the journal Polyoxometalates.

The team investigated the phosphine-LEIST reaction. This method shows advantages in metal nanoclusters’ structural modification and property modulation. “The method we reviewed is able to modulate the atomically precise structure of metal nanoclusters and regulate their corresponding performance,” said Man-Bo Li, a professor at Anhui University, China.

Researchers have demonstrated a programmable nano-scale robot, made from a few strands of DNA, that’s capable of grabbing other snippets of DNA, and positioning them together to manufacture new UV-welded nano-machines – including copies of itself.

The robots, according to New Scientist, are created using just four strands of DNA, and measure just 100 nanometers across, so about a thousand of them could squeeze up into a line the width of a human hair.

The team, from New York University, the Ningbo Cixi Institute of Biomechanical Engineering, and The Chinese Academy of Sciences, says the robots surpass previous efforts, which were only able to assemble pieces into two-dimensional shapes. The new bots are able to use “multiple-axis precise folding and positioning” to “access the third dimension and more degrees of freedom.”