Items Tagged With Life Science

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated the use of water droplets as minuscule “boxes” for small numbers of biomolecules. The unusually simple containment method may enable easier experiments on single molecule dynamics and perhaps lead to the development of molecule-sorting devices that might be used for medical screening or biotechnology research. The work was reported in the 3 July issue of Applied Physics Letters (doi: 10.1063/1.2219977).

Subhash Risbud, professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, John Miao from UCLA, and colleagues from Japan and Taiwan just published a paper in Physical Review Letters (doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.215503) describing a new X-ray microscope that can look at nanomaterials in three dimensions. The device could be used for making better materials, for example for use in electronics, optics and biotechnology.

In a mixing of pasta metaphors, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists have used electrostatic attraction to layer reactive biological molecules lasagna-like around spaghetti-like carbon nanotubes. The configuration can accommodate a wide range of applications, from ultra-precise blood-sugar monitoring to infectious-agent detection, said Yuehe Lin, who led the research at the Department of Energy campus’ W.R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.

Echoing the journey through the human body in Fantastic Voyage, doctors might soon be able to track individual donor cells after a transplant, or to find where and how much of a cancer treatment drug there is within a cell. New technology described in a study published today in the open access journal Journal of Biology makes it possible to image and quantify molecules within individual mammalian or bacterial cells. Claude Lechene and colleagues describe the development of multi-isotope imaging mass spectrometry (MIMS), which has applications in all fields of biology and biomedical research.

Scientists from the US Department Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a ruler made of gold nanoparticles and DNA that can measure the smallest of life’s phenomena, such as precisely where on a DNA strand a protein attaches itself.