How Nanoscience Will Improve Our Lives in the Coming Years

In a newly published study, nanoscientists look ahead to what we can expect in the coming decade, and conclude that nanoscience is poised to make important contributions in many areas, including health care, electronics, energy, food and water.

Nanoscience research involves molecules that are only 1/100th the size of cancer cells and that have the potential to profoundly improve the quality of our health and our lives. Now nine prominent nanoscientists look ahead to what we can expect in the coming decade, and conclude that nanoscience is poised to make important contributions in many areas, including health care, electronics, energy, food and water.

Significant progress has already been made in nanomaterials, report authors Paul Weiss, who holds a UC presidential chair and is a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA, and Dr. Andre Nel, chief of nanomedicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In the journal ACS Nano, Weiss, Nel, who is a distinguished professor of medicine, and their colleagues say the following:

• Nanoparticles can be designed to target infectious disease. Nanomaterials may target the lungs to deliver potent antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs could fight bacterial and viral infection.
• Nanoparticles may lead to more effective treatments of neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as arthritis.
• The emerging field of immuno-oncology is likely to produce advances that will activate the body’s immune system to attack tumor cells. Important advantages of nanoparticles are that they can bind selectively to receptors over-expressed on tumors and may be delivered to the same cell at a predetermined dose and timing, although significant scientific challenges remain.
• The microelectronics industry has been manufacturing products with nanoscale structures for decades — a market currently valued at approximately $500 billion annually. The researchers say there is still plenty of room for major improvements, including many opportunities in creative design of devices for data processing and information storage.
• Nanotechnology is likely to capture, convert and store energy with greater efficiency, and will help to safely produce sustainable and efficient large-scale energy production to meet the increasing worldwide demand for energy.
• Nanotechnology principles are being used in water desalination and purification, and nanotechnology is poised to make major contributions to supplying clean water globally.
• Technology is likely to become increasingly widespread, with the proliferation of “nano-enabled smart devices” in such areas as telecommunications, consumer staples and information technology.
• Nanoscience advances may lead to advances in food safety and reductions in food contamination. Sensor technologies may be designed that exploit changes at the surface of nanostructures so they can detect disease-causing pathogens before they spread. Nanoscale sensor technologies also may lead to improvements in agrochemicals.

The researchers discuss the need to safely implement new nanomaterials and present ideas for doing so. They also call for researchers to communicate their research with the public.

Nanoscience has brought together scientists, engineers and clinicians from many fields, and will continue to cross many academic boundaries.

“The field is poised to make contributions far beyond the nanoscale worlds that we have explored so far,” said Weiss, who is also a distinguished professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA. “This is the age of discovery for nanoscience and nanotechnology.”

Weiss and Nel, who are members of the California Nanosystems Institute, and the other researchers advocate strong federal support for nanoscience, and predict significant progress toward major scientific goals will be achieved by the end of this decade. They also advocate basic research to produce currently unforeseen discoveries.

Publication: Cherie R. Kagan, et al., “Nano Day: Celebrating the Next Decade of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology,” ACS Nano, 2016, 10 (10), pp 9093–9103; DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.6b06655

Source: Stuart Wolpert, UCLA News

Nanobionic spinach plants can detect explosives

After sensing dangerous chemicals, the carbon-nanotube-enhanced plants send an alert.Watch Video

Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
October 31, 2016

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Spinach is no longer just a superfood: By embedding leaves with carbon nanotubes, MIT engineers have transformed spinach plants into sensors that can detect explosives and wirelessly relay that information to a handheld device similar to a smartphone.

This is one of the first demonstrations of engineering electronic systems into plants, an approach that the researchers call “plant nanobionics.”

“The goal of plant nanobionics is to introduce nanoparticles into the plant to give it non-native functions,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the leader of the research team.

In this case, the plants were designed to detect chemical compounds known as nitroaromatics, which are often used in landmines and other explosives. When one of these chemicals is present in the groundwater sampled naturally by the plant, carbon nanotubes embedded in the plant leaves emit a fluorescent signal that can be read with an infrared camera. The camera can be attached to a small computer similar to a smartphone, which then sends an email to the user.

“This is a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier,” says Strano, who believes plant power could also be harnessed to warn of pollutants and environmental conditions such as drought.

Strano is the senior author of a paper describing the nanobionic plants in the Oct. 31 issue of Nature Materials. The paper’s lead authors are Min Hao Wong, an MIT graduate student who has started a company called Plantea to further develop this technology, and Juan Pablo Giraldo, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of California at Riverside.

Environmental monitoring

Two years ago, in the first demonstration of plant nanobionics, Strano and Giraldo used nanoparticles to enhance plants’ photosynthesis ability and to turn them into sensors for nitric oxide, a pollutant produced by combustion.

Plants are ideally suited for monitoring the environment because they already take in a lot of information from their surroundings, Strano says.

“Plants are very good analytical chemists,” he says. “They have an extensive root network in the soil, are constantly sampling groundwater, and have a way to self-power the transport of that water up into the leaves.”

Strano’s lab has previously developed carbon nanotubes that can be used as sensors to detect a wide range of molecules, including hydrogen peroxide, the explosive TNT, and the nerve gas sarin. When the target molecule binds to a polymer wrapped around the nanotube, it alters the tube’s fluorescence.

In the new study, the researchers embedded sensors for nitroaromatic compounds into the leaves of spinach plants. Using a technique called vascular infusion, which involves applying a solution of nanoparticles to the underside of the leaf, they placed the sensors into a leaf layer known as the mesophyll, which is where most photosynthesis takes place.

They also embedded carbon nanotubes that emit a constant fluorescent signal that serves as a reference. This allows the researchers to compare the two fluorescent signals, making it easier to determine if the explosive sensor has detected anything. If there are any explosive molecules in the groundwater, it takes about 10 minutes for the plant to draw them up into the leaves, where they encounter the detector.

To read the signal, the researchers shine a laser onto the leaf, prompting the nanotubes in the leaf to emit near-infrared fluorescent light. This can be detected with a small infrared camera connected to a Raspberry Pi, a $35 credit-card-sized computer similar to the computer inside a smartphone. The signal could also be detected with a smartphone by removing the infrared filter that most camera phones have, the researchers say.

“This setup could be replaced by a cell phone and the right kind of camera,” Strano says. “It’s just the infrared filter that would stop you from using your cell phone.”

Using this setup, the researchers can pick up a signal from about 1 meter away from the plant, and they are now working on increasing that distance.

Michael McAlpine, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, says this approach holds great potential for engineering not only sensors but many other kinds of bionic plants that might receive radio signals or change color.

“When you have manmade materials infiltrated into a living organism, you can have plants do things that plants don’t ordinarily do,” says McAlpine, who was not involved in the research. “Once you start to think of living organisms like plants as biomaterials that can be combined with electronic materials, this is all possible.”

“A wealth of information”

In the 2014 plant nanobionics study, Strano’s lab worked with a common laboratory plant known as Arabidopsis thaliana. However, the researchers wanted to use common spinach plants for the latest study, to demonstrate the versatility of this technique. “You can apply these techniques with any living plant,” Strano says.

So far, the researchers have also engineered spinach plants that can detect dopamine, which influences plant root growth, and they are now working on additional sensors, including some that track the chemicals plants use to convey information within their own tissues.

“Plants are very environmentally responsive,” Strano says. “They know that there is going to be a drought long before we do. They can detect small changes in the properties of soil and water potential. If we tap into those chemical signaling pathways, there is a wealth of information to access.”

These sensors could also help botanists learn more about the inner workings of plants, monitor plant health, and maximize the yield of rare compounds synthesized by plants such as the Madagascar periwinkle, which produces drugs used to treat cancer.

“These sensors give real-time information from the plant. It is almost like having the plant talk to us about the environment they are in,” Wong says. “In the case of precision agriculture, having such information can directly affect yield and margins.”