I know points have been added and everything, and not that I've been distracted or anything, but there is an interesting (news) article: Artificial cells evolve proteins to structure semiconductors(snazzy title!)
This is based on PNAS article pubished in April (there's a very exciting intro in this).
(The news article seems much more optimistic/daring than the article)
The claim is that they have biofabricated silicon dioxide and titanium doxide (which they point out is in solar cells!).
From what I understand, they're taking advantage of biomineralisation -> sort of like skeleton of sea sponge (and humans and bones).
They place a seed inside a cell (fungus). DNA will then wrapped around the bead, which grows the material (the function of this DNA string). The proteins from these genes have been produced.
I suppose it's not too far-fetched of an application, but now the genes that could involved with making SiO2 and TiO2, have been identified and proteins synthetised.
It's not a big step to suggest we could use these proteins on a small labscale - on a larger scale is a different question entirely. Perhaps with regards to manufacturing very small structures, biofabrication would be most useful.
I suppose one must also question the efficiency of engineering bacteria to make such materials compared to convential methods.
Sidenote: the comments with the news article are interesting, and quite entertaining.
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This sounds pretty cool, although I shall have to look at the article to work out exactly what the cells are doing. Is it a protein which makes more SiO/TiO2 or does it mineralise around the DNA? But I also think that anything inside the cell will be tricky to get out of the cell, so this method may only work for producing raw material :(. But maybe you could bet bacteria to make biofilms with organised material in them as an extension.... Or use goat's milk like they did for spider silk. :)
ReplyDeleteCool anyway.
New techniques are in practice for the formation of solar fabric that will make wearer to harvest energy.
ReplyDeleteAsic Design