Nanotubes Presented as Effective Kidney Tumor Pest Control

Cancer will one day have no where to hide from nanotechnolgy's Orwellian (Orwellian in a good way, that is) eyes:

By injecting man-made, microscopic tubes into tumors and heating them with a quick, 30-second zap of a laser, scientists have discovered a way to effectively kill kidney tumors in nearly 80 percent of mice. Researchers say that the finding suggests a potential future cancer treatment for humans.
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Using a mouse model, researchers injected kidney tumors with different quantities of MWCNTs and exposed the area to a three-watt laser for 30 seconds.

Researchers found that the mice who received no treatment for their tumors died about 30 days into the study. Mice who received the nanotubes alone or laser treatment alone survived for a similar length of time. However, in the mice who received the MWCNTs followed by a 30-second laser treatment, researchers found that the higher the quantity of nanotubes injected, the longer the mice lived and the less tumor regrowth was seen. In fact, in the group that received the highest dose of

MWCNTs, tumors completely disappeared in 80 percent of the mice. Many of those mice continued to live tumor-free through the completion of the study, which was bout nine months later.

- Brewskie

DNA-derived LEDs

You first heard of the florscent green monkey; now we have this - light bulbs made from DNA.

By adding fluorescent dyes to DNA and then spinning the DNA strands into nanofibers, researchers at the University of Connecticut have made a new material that emits bright white light. The material absorbs energy from ultraviolet light and gives off different colors of light--from blue to orange to white--depending on the proportions of dye it contains.

The researchers, led by chemistry professor Gregory Sotzing, create white-light-emitting devices by coating ultraviolet (UV) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) with the material. They are even able to fine-tune the white color tone to make it warm or cold, as they report in a paper published online in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The new material could be used to make a novel type of organic light bulb. The light emitters should also be longer-lasting because DNA is a very strong polymer, Sotzing says. "It's well beyond other polymers [in strength]," he notes, adding that it lasts 50 times longer than acrylic.

The color-tunable DNA material relies on an energy-transfer mechanism between two different fluorescent dyes. The key is to keep the dye molecules separated at a distance of 2 to 10 nanometers from each other. When UV light is shined on the material, one dye absorbs the energy and produces blue light. If the other dye molecule is at the right distance, it will absorb part of that blue-light energy and emit orange light.

- Brewskie

Bacteria's "Rosseta Stone" Unearthed

Read this and think deeply...

The Rosetta Stone of bacterial communication may have been found. Although they have no sensory organs, bacteria can get a good idea about what's going on in their neighborhood and communicate with each other, mainly by secreting and taking in chemicals from their surrounding environment. Even though there are millions of different kinds of bacteria with their own ways of sensing the world around them, Duke University bioengineers believe they have found a principle common to all of them.

The researchers said that a more complete understanding of communication between cells and bacteria is essential to the advancement of the new field of synthetic biology, where populations of genetically altered bacteria are "programmed" to do certain things. Such re-programmed bacterial gene circuits could see a wide variety of applications in medicine, environmental cleanup and biocomputing.

It is already known that a process known as "quorum sensing" underlies
communication between bacteria. However, each type of bacteria seems to have its
own quorum-sensing abilities, with tremendous variations, the researchers said.

"Quorum sensing is a cell-to-cell communication mechanism that enables bacteria to sense and respond to changes in the density of the bacteria in a given environment," said Anand Pai, graduate student in bioengineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. "It regulates a wide variety of biological functions such as bioluminescence, virulence, nutrient foraging and cellular suicide."

The researchers found that the total volume of bacteria in relation to the volume of their environment is a key to quorum sensing, no matter what kind of microbe is involved.

"If there are only a few cells in an area, nothing will happen," Pai said. "If there are a lot of cells, the secreted chemicals are high in concentration, causing the cells to perform a specific action. We wanted to find out how these cells know when they have reached a quorum."

Pai and scientist Lingchong You, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and a member of Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and Center for Systems Biology, have discovered what they believe is a common root among the different forms of quorum sensing. In an article in the July 2009 issue of the journal Molecular Systems Biology, they term this process "sensing potential."

- Brewskie