Category Biology/Biotechnology

Purdue University researchers have created a drug delivery method using silicon nanoneedles with diameters 100 times smaller than a mosquito’s needle. These nanoneedles are embedded in a stretchable and translucent elastomer patch that can be worn on the skin to deliver exact doses directly into cells.
Credit: Purdue image

Minimally invasive patch delivers exact doses directly into cells, lessens pain, toxicity. Purdue University researchers have developed a new flexible and translucent base for silicon nanoneedle patches to deliver exact doses of biomolecules directly into cells and expand observational opportunities.

“This means that eight or nine silicon nanoneedles can be injected into a single cell without significantly damaging a cell...

The illustration shows a diseased kidney on the left and a healthy kidney on the right, after rectangular DNA nanostructures migrated and accumulated in the kidney, acting to alleviate damage due to oxidative stress. Graphic by Shireen Dooling.

Researchers have developed a new method for treating and preventing acute kidney injury. Their technique involves the use of tiny, self-assembling forms measuring just billionths of a meter in diameter. Each year, there are some 13.3 million new cases of acute kidney injury (AKI), a serious affliction. Formerly known as acute renal failure, the ailment produces a rapid buildup of nitrogenous wastes and decreases urine output, usually within hours or days of disease onset. Severe complications often ensue.

AKI is responsible for 1...

Chlamydia bacteria (green), use a dual-function enzyme called ChlaDUB1 to build a shell around themselves with pieces of the host cell’s Golgi apparatus (red).
Credit: Robert Bastidas – Duke University

The bacterium remodels human cells for its own nefarious purposes. When Chlamydia trachomatis, the bacterium that causes one of the most common sexually transmitted infections worldwide, infects a human cell, it hijacks parts of the host to build protective layers around itself.

Inside this makeshift fortress, the bug grows and reproduces, eventually bursting out in search of a new target and killing the host cell. While scientists have known for years that Chlamydia protects itself in this way, they were missing the mechanics until now...

This is a white button mushroom equipped with 3D- printed graphene nanoribbons (black), which collect electricity generated by densely packed 3D-printed cyanobacteria (green).
Credit: Sudeep Joshi, Stevens Institute of Technology

In their latest feat of engineering, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have taken an ordinary white button mushroom from a grocery store and made it bionic, supercharging it with 3D-printed clusters of cyanobacteria that generate electricity and swirls of graphene nanoribbons that can collect the current.

The work, reported in the Nov...