Corneal transplants can be the last step to returning clear vision to many patients suffering from eye disease. Each year, approximately 80,000 corneal transplantations take place in the U.S. Worldwide, more than 184,000 corneal transplantation surgeries are performed annually.
However, rejection rates for the corneal grafts can be as high as 10%. This is largely due to poor patient compliance to the medications, which require frequent administrations of topical eyedrops over a long period of time.
This becomes especially acute when patients show signs of early rejection of the transplanted corneas. When this occurs, patients need to apply topical eyedrops hourly to rescue the corneal grafts from failure.
An international team of scientists is developing an inkable nanomaterial that they say could one day become a spray-on electronic component for ultra-thin, lightweight and bendable displays and devices.
The material, zinc oxide, could be incorporated into many components of future technologies including mobile phones and computers, thanks to its versatility and recent advances in nanotechnology, according to the team.
RMIT University’s Associate Professor Enrico Della Gaspera and Dr. Joel van Embden led a team of global experts to review production strategies, capabilities and potential applications of zinc oxide nanocrystals in the journal Chemical Reviews.
The human body is made up of thousands of tiny lymphatic vessels that ferry white blood cells and proteins around the body, like a superhighway of the immune system. It’s remarkably efficient, but if damaged from injury or cancer treatment, the whole system starts to fail. The resulting fluid retention and swelling, called lymphedema, isn’t just uncomfortable—it’s also irreversible.
When lymphatic vessels fail, typically their ability to pump out the fluid is compromised. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new treatment using nanoparticles that can repair lymphatic vessel pumping. Traditionally, researchers in the field have tried to regrow lymphatic vessels, but repairing the pumping action is a unique approach.
“With many patients, the challenge is that the lymphatic vessels that still exist in the patient aren’t working. So it’s not that you need to grow new vessels that you can think of as tubes, it’s that you need to get the tubes to work, which for lymphatic vessels means to pump,” said Brandon Dixon, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “That’s where our approach is really different. It delivers a drug to help lymphatic vessels pump using a nanoparticle that can drain into the diseased vessels themselves.”
A model system created by stacking a pair of monolayer semiconductors is giving physicists a simpler way to study confounding quantum behavior, from heavy fermions to exotic quantum phase transitions.
The group’s paper, “Gate-Tunable Heavy Fermions in a Moiré Kondo Lattice,” published March 15 in Nature. The lead author is postdoctoral fellow Wenjin Zhao in the Kavli Institute at Cornell.
The project was led by Kin Fai Mak, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Jie Shan, professor of applied and engineering physics in Cornell Engineering and in A&S, the paper’s co-senior authors. Both researchers are members of the Kavli Institute; they came to Cornell through the provost’s Nanoscale Science and Microsystems Engineering (NEXT Nano) initiative.
A joint research project’s findings have just been published in the journal Nature Materials from engineers from MIT, Caltech, and ETH Zurich that has yielded a “nano-architectured” material that could prove stronger than Kevlar and steel. This material, once scaled, could provide a means of developed lightweight, protective coverings, blast shields, and other impact-resistance materials and armors for various industries.
The material is less than a width of a human hair, but still able to prevent the tiny, high-speed particles from penetrating it. According to the researchers behind the project, when compared with steel Kevlar, aluminum rother impact-resistant materials of comparable weight, the new nanotech armor outperforms them all.
A biological method that produces metal nanoclusters using the electroactive bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens could provide a cheap and sustainable solution to high-performance catalyst synthesis for various applications such as water splitting.
Metal nanoclusters contain fewer than one hundred atoms and are much smaller than nanoparticles. They have unique electronic properties but also feature numerous active sites available for catalysis on their surface. There are several synthetic methods for making metal nanoclusters, but most require multiple steps involving toxic substances and harsh temperature and pressure conditions.
Biological methods are expected to deliver ecofriendly alternatives to conventional chemical synthesis. Yet, to date, they have only led to large nanoparticles in a wide range of sizes. “We found a way to control the size of the nanoclusters,” says Rodrigo Jimenez-Sandoval, a Ph.D. candidate in Pascal Saikaly’s group at KAUST.
Year 2022 😗😁 Basically more thought on this virus seems more like a foglet biotechnology so it would stand to reason that a nanotechnology with biotechnology could solve the universal vaccine.
Ending the covid pandemic might well require a vaccine that protects against any new strains. Researchers may have found a strategy that will work.
Micron-sized “bow ties,” self-assembled from nanoparticles, form a variety of different curling shapes that can be precisely controlled, a research team led by the University of Michigan has shown.
The development opens the way for easily producing materials that interact with twisted light, providing new tools for machine vision and producing medicines.
While biology is full of twisted structures like DNA, known as chiral structures, the degree of twist is locked in—trying to change it breaks the structure. Now, researchers can engineer the degree of twist.
Researchers at Kanazawa University report in ACS Nano how high-speed atomic force microscopy can be used to study the biomolecular mechanisms underlying gene editing.
The DNA of prokaryotes—single-cell organisms, for example bacteria—is known to contain sequences that are derived from DNA fragments of viruses that infected the prokaryote earlier. These sequences, collectively referred to as CRISPR, for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” play a major role in the antiviral defense system of bacteria, as they enable the recognition and subsequent neutralization of infecting viruses. The latter is done through the enzyme Cas9 (“CRISPR-associated protein 9”), a biomolecule that can locally unwind DNA, check for the existence of the CRISPR sequence and, when found, cut the DNA.
In recent years, CRISPR/Cas9 has emerged as a genome editing tool based on the notion that the Cas9 protein can be activated with artificially created CRISPR-like sequences. Sometimes, however, the wrong target is “caught” by Cas9—when the wrongly identified DNA sequence is too similar to the intended target sequence. It is therefore of crucial importance to fully understand how Cas9 binds to, “interrogates,” and cuts DNA. Mikihiro Shibata from Kanazawa University and colleagues have now succeeded in video-recording the DNA binding and cleaving dynamics of Staphylococcus aureus (a particular bacterium) Cas9 by means of high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM). Their observations will help to reach a more complete understanding of CRISPR-Cas9 mechanisms.
