{"id":146263,"date":"2022-09-13T13:24:06","date_gmt":"2022-09-13T18:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/nanotubes-illuminate-the-way-to-living-photovoltaics"},"modified":"2022-09-13T13:24:06","modified_gmt":"2022-09-13T18:24:06","slug":"nanotubes-illuminate-the-way-to-living-photovoltaics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/nanotubes-illuminate-the-way-to-living-photovoltaics","title":{"rendered":"Nanotubes illuminate the way to living photovoltaics"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe put nanotubes inside of bacteria,\u201d says Professor Ardemis Boghossian at EPFL\u2019s School of Basic Sciences. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t sound very exciting on the surface, but it\u2019s actually a big deal. Researchers have been putting nanotubes in mammalian cells that use mechanisms like endocytosis, that are specific to those kinds of cells. Bacteria, on the other hand, don\u2019t have these mechanisms and face additional challenges in getting particles through their tough exterior. Despite these barriers, we\u2019ve managed to do it, and this has very exciting implications in terms of applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boghossian\u2019s research focuses on interfacing artificial nanomaterials with biological constructs, including living cells. The resulting \u201cnanobionic\u201d technologies combine the advantages of both the living and non-living worlds. For years, her group has worked on the nanomaterial applications of single-walled carbon nanotubes<\/a> (SWCNTs), tubes of carbon atoms with fascinating mechanical and optical properties<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These properties make SWCNTs ideal for many novel applications in the field of nanobiotechnology. For example, SWCNTs have been placed inside mammalian cells<\/a> to monitor their metabolisms using near-infrared imaging. The insertion of SWCNTs in mammalian cells has also led to new technologies for delivering therapeutic drugs to their intracellular targets, while in plant cells they have been used for genome editing. SWCNTs have also been implanted in living mice to demonstrate their ability to image biological tissue deep inside the body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe put nanotubes inside of bacteria,\u201d says Professor Ardemis Boghossian at EPFL\u2019s School of Basic Sciences. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t sound very exciting on the surface, but it\u2019s actually a big deal. Researchers have been putting nanotubes in mammalian cells that use mechanisms like endocytosis, that are specific to those kinds of cells. Bacteria, on the other [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1499,4,1501],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-cyborgs","category-nanotechnology","category-transhumanism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}