{"id":27996,"date":"2016-07-18T22:03:14","date_gmt":"2016-07-19T05:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/green-electronic-materials-produced-with-synthetic-biology"},"modified":"2017-06-04T10:05:35","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T17:05:35","slug":"green-electronic-materials-produced-with-synthetic-biology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/green-electronic-materials-produced-with-synthetic-biology","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Green\u2019 electronic materials produced with synthetic biology"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Biowire.<\/p>\n

\n

Researchers led by microbiologist Derek Lovely say the wires, which rival the thinnest wires known to man, are produced from renewable, inexpensive feedstocks and avoid the harsh chemical processes typically used to produce nanoelectronic materials.<\/p>\n

Lovley says, \u201cNew sources of electronic materials are needed to meet the increasing demand for making smaller, more powerful electronic devices in a sustainable way.\u201d The ability to mass-produce such thin conductive wires with this sustainable technology has many potential applications in electronic devices, functioning not only as wires, but also transistors and capacitors. Proposed applications include biocompatible sensors, computing devices, and as components of solar panels.<\/p>\n

This advance began a decade ago, when Lovley and colleagues discovered that Geobacter, a common soil microorganism, could produce \u201cmicrobial nanowires,\u201d electrically conductive protein filaments that help the microbe grow on the iron minerals abundant in soil. These microbial nanowires were conductive enough to meet the bacterium\u2019s needs, but their conductivity was well below the conductivities of organic wires that chemists could synthesize.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biowire. Researchers led by microbiologist Derek Lovely say the wires, which rival the thinnest wires known to man, are produced from renewable, inexpensive feedstocks and avoid the harsh chemical processes typically used to produce nanoelectronic materials. Lovley says, \u201cNew sources of electronic materials are needed to meet the increasing demand for making smaller, more powerful [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,1523,4,1633,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-nanotechnology","category-solar-power","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27996","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\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27996"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61129,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27996\/revisions\/61129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}