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Category: nanotechnology

Scientists use sound waves to deliver a new attack on deadly brain cancer

Scientists at the University of Virginia Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed a promising experimental strategy for treating glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive malignant brain tumor in adults. The new approach could help overcome some of the biggest obstacles that have limited the effectiveness of existing brain cancer treatments.

The research team, led by UVA’s Roger Abounader, MD, PhD, identified tiny genetic molecules known as “microRNAs” that can interfere with several genes responsible for the development and growth of glioblastoma. To deliver these molecules into the brain, the researchers combined specialized nanoparticles, focused ultrasound and microscopic bubbles. Together, these technologies offer a way to temporarily cross the brain’s protective barrier, which normally prevents many treatments from reaching brain tumors and other neurological conditions.

Living cells inspire tiny channels that could help extract lithium for batteries

Gathering lithium, a crucial element in batteries for smartphones, electric cars and the electrical grid, is a time-consuming and energy-intensive process, but new technology could make it much easier.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin developed a new way to separate lithium from other co-occurring elements, potentially speeding up extraction of this critical element and increasing domestic supply. They developed nanoscale, artificial channels, inspired by the natural doors that let ions and molecules in and out of living cells, that allow lithium to pass through while restricting other competing ions that typically come with it.

These channels, tiny pores that sit inside membranes, were two to five times more selective for lithium compared with other recently developed lithium transporters. The researchers say their channels are among the most selective ever created.

Customizable nanoparticles show potential for delivering personalized cancer vaccines

A nanoscale particle with a unique structure, developed at MIT, holds potential as a customizable delivery vehicle for personalized cancer vaccines. The backbone of the vaccine is a modified, harmless bacteriophage called M13, which forms a nanofiber that can be coated with cancer antigens. By precisely controlling the density of those cancer proteins, the researchers found that they could create a vaccine that prevents the development of colon tumors in mice.

This type of delivery particle could be adapted to carry many different antigens, allowing for the creation of personalized vaccines to treat individual patients’ tumors, the researchers say.

“The great thing about this is that it’s modular and we could switch out different antigens on demand, so you could design it to be patient-specific and target a known antigen for a particular kind of cancer,” says Angela Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering and a member of the Koch Institute.

Detailed images reveal ribosome assembly inside human cells for the first time

For decades, ribosomes have been under the lens of many scientists. Ribosomes are highly sophisticated and complex molecular machines that allow cells to synthesize proteins. However, putting ribosomes together requires intricate assembly processes. While many underlying mechanisms for building ribosomes have been discovered ex situ (outside their native cellular context), our understanding of how ribosomes are assembled in situ has so far remained limited.

Through a collaboration between the research groups of Christoph Müller, Sara Cuylen-Häring and Julia Mahamid at EMBL Heidelberg, researchers have now pushed these limits. By combining cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) with correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM), they were able to image the nucleolus—the site of ribosome assembly inside cells—at sufficiently high resolution to visualize the ribosome assembly pathway inside intact human cells for the first time.

The results—a collection of molecular snapshots—yielded subnanometer-resolution in-cell structures of tens of intermediates along the ribosome assembly pathways, complementing and expanding previous insights into ribosome assembly obtained from ex situ structures. The new results have now been published in the journal Science.

New Microscope Technology Captures the Hidden World Inside Living Cells Like Never Before

A new imaging technique allows scientists to capture fleeting cellular processes that conventional microscopes struggle to resolve.

Living cells are constantly in motion, but capturing their smallest structures in sharp detail has long been a challenge. Traditional super-resolution microscopy often requires hundreds or thousands of images to reveal features too small for conventional light microscopes. When structures move during that process, the resulting images can become blurred. Now, researchers have developed a technique that captures these microscopic details in a single camera exposure.

The new method, called Spatial Polarization-Induced Fluorescence Fluctuation Imaging (SPIFFI), was developed by a team led by Aleksandra Radenovic at the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology (LBEN) in EPFL’s School of Engineering. Published in Nature Methods, the research demonstrates up to a twofold improvement in image resolution, allowing scientists to distinguish structures as small as 160 to 170 nanometers while observing living cells.

Thought Experiment: Bright Visions of Future Energy

The same pursuit of greater efficiency motivates current research on artificial photosynthesis. Natural photosynthesis can already provide chemical fuel: In the US, for example, maize is grown and converted to ethanol. But it takes a plot of 9.6 hectares, or 24 acres, to produce enough ethanol to fill one gasoline truck. Maize must also be ground up and fermented to produce the ethanol. Artificial photosynthesis aims to bypass such efficiency-sapping steps by converting sunlight more directly into fuels and other useful chemicals.

Photosynthesis requires splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. However, the oxygen generated during this process is highly corrosive, attacking—or “rusting”—the catalysts responsible for lowering the reaction’s energy barrier. Natural photosynthesis mitigates this damage by continually resynthesizing the core protein complex of photosystem II whenever it degrades. Although finding a cheap, robust catalyst for artificial photosynthesis remains elusive, researchers are making steady progress. In fact, artificial systems have already surpassed natural plants in solar-to-fuel efficiency by a factor of 5. To close the remaining gaps, scientists are actively developing innovative hybrid nanomaterials to serve as next-generation catalysts.

Since artificial photosynthesis remains far from established more than a century after Ciamician offered his vision, one might have grounds for despondency. But I’m optimistic, in part because the path from basic research to practical technology can be long. Engineer and inventor George Cayley expounded the physics of flying machines in his treatise “On Aerial Navigation” (1809–1810). The Wright brothers acknowledged their debt to Cayley, but nearly a century passed before they demonstrated a motorized aircraft capable of sustained flight in 1903.

Single X-ray pulse reveals plasma nanostructures across scales with one camera

Understanding instabilities and turbulence in plasmas is one of the key challenges across a wide range of plasma research fields, including nuclear fusion, astrophysics and laser-plasma physics. In plasmas, slight disturbances can grow due to instabilities, and energy is transferred between structures of various sizes due to turbulence. These phenomena give rise to structures ranging from very small to large, which significantly influence the overall motion and energy flow of the plasma.

Since structures generated by instabilities and turbulence vary with even slight differences in conditions, it is not easy to reproduce the same state in every experiment. Therefore, there is a need for “spatially multiscale single-shot measurements” that can simultaneously capture structures of a wide range of sizes in a single measurement. In particular, in high-energy-density plasmas, instabilities grow in an extremely short time, so high temporal and spatial resolution is also required to capture their initial stages.

By combining the newly developed “beamstop-free X-ray small-angle scattering method” with an X-ray free-electron laser and a microscale rod assembly target, an international research group, led by Assistant Professor Masato Ota of the National Institute for Fusion Science (then a graduate student at the Graduate School of Science, Osaka University), Associate Professor Yoichi Sakawa of the Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University, succeeded in measuring the structural collapse and rarefaction processes of high-energy-density plasma across a wide range of spatial scales—from 10 nm to 500 nm—with sub-picosecond temporal resolution.

Single optical element combines soft X-ray imaging and spectroscopy

An international research team from Germany, Switzerland and Japan has demonstrated in a recent study that a single reflection zone plate (RZP) can perform both soft X-ray imaging and resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) mapping. The approach could simplify future instruments that need to determine both where structures are located in a material and how their electronic properties vary.

The study, which was published in Optics Express, was carried out at the P04 beamline of the PETRA III synchrotron radiation source at DESY in Hamburg. The researchers used an RZP, a precisely nanostructured reflective optic that simultaneously focuses and disperses soft X-rays. Conventional X-ray imaging provides spatial information about a sample, whereas spectroscopy reveals its electronic structure, chemical bonding and excited states.

Combining the two capabilities usually requires several optical components and demanding alignment procedures. In the new work, the RZP acts as an all-in-one element for reflection, focusing, imaging and spectral dispersion.

Archimedes screw inspires single-molecule motor powered by electric current

Molecular machines are regarded as the next step in miniaturization. Their models can be found in living cells, where molecular motors convert energy and generate movement. Scientists have been working for decades to artificially replicate such systems. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for this research.

Molecular motors powered directly by an electric current have been in existence since 2011. Until now, however, they have only functioned as molecules on a surface, driven by the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope.

For their new machine, the researchers drew inspiration from one of humanity’s oldest documented machines: the Archimedes screw, which transports water uphill. The researchers applied the principle of the Archimedes screw at the molecular level. Instead of water, electrons flow through a helical structure, setting it in rotation.

Light-based method enables precise control of ultrafast electron flow in a scanning tunneling microscope

What would it take to watch an electron move through a material? Researchers would need to see individual atoms and capture an electron’s motion at incredibly short timescales. A Technion-led team has brought those two capabilities together in a scanning tunneling microscope, using carefully shaped laser pulses to control the direction of electron flow while preserving nanoscale spatial resolution.

The study, led by Michael Krüger of the Technion Faculty of Physics and published in Nature Photonics, builds on a microscope with an exceptionally sharp needle tip. When the needle tip is brought very close to a surface, electrons can cross the gap through a quantum effect called tunneling. The resulting current flow lets researchers map minute features of the surface. Until now, following the rapid movement of electrons within that tiny gap has been a major challenge.

The team directed infrared laser pulses into the gap between the tip and the sample. Each pulse contained two colors of light. By changing their relative timing, the researchers changed the shape of the light wave—and could steer electrons from the needle tip to the sample or back in the opposite direction. They adjusted the timing instead of repeatedly turning the laser on and off, helping them distinguish the ultrafast current from noise signals caused by laser heating.