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Category: engineering

Engineering a Mechanoresponsive DNA Origami Capsule for Drug Delivery to Narrowed ArteriesClick to copy article linkArticle link copied!

Omer et al. design a DNA origami box with a lid held closed by an elastic single-stranded DNA spring. The box may selectively open in blood vessels with pathological levels of shear flow, facilitating drug delivery to sites of thrombosis while minimizing off-target toxicity. It should be noted that this paper focused entirely on the box’s design and mechanical validation (via optical tweezers) and did not perform any experiments to show drug delivery. Nonetheless, this is a good start and I’m glad to see people thinking about DNA origami for therapeutic applications. [ https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04066](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04066)

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Insect salivary effectors disrupt PIEZO1-centric mechanoimmunity against piercing-sucking vectors

Huang et al. identify the mechanosensitive channel PIEZO1 as a plant immune hub that decodes insect-feeding-derived mechanical forces and Ca2+-activated defense responses. They characterize a self-amplifying immune circuit and identify that Bsp9, an evolutionarily conserved insect salivary effector, subverts this pathway. This work provides a framework for engineering plant disease resistance.

Substituting stereotactic body radiation therapy boost for brachytherapy in Mayo protocol for peri-hilar cholangiocarcinoma

Blood vessels are less like straight pipes and more like a crowded city road map, with turns, forks, and sudden choke points that can change how traffic moves. For a long time, many lab built vessel models skipped that complexity and relied on simple, straight channels, even though real vessels rarely behave that neatly.

Researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University are trying to close that gap with a customizable vessel-chip method. The goal is to recreate the kinds of shapes that matter in disease, so experiments on blood flow and potential treatments reflect what happens in the body more closely and can better support drug discovery.

Vessel-chips are engineered microfluidic devices that mimic human vasculature on a microscopic scale. Instead of studying blood flow in animals or oversimplified lab setups, scientists can use these chips to examine how fluid forces move through vessel-like structures in a controlled environment. Because the design can be tailored, the platform can also support patient-focused studies, which is especially useful when small differences in anatomy may affect how disease develops or how a therapy performs.

Scientists teach microorganisms to build molecules with light

Researchers are continually looking for new ways to hack the cellular machinery of microbes like yeast and bacteria to make products that are useful for humans and society. In a new proof-of-concept study, a team from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology showed they can expand the biosynthetic capabilities of these microbes by using light to help access new types of chemical transformations.

The paper, published in Nature Catalysis, demonstrates how the bacteria Escherichia coli can be engineered to produce these new molecules in vivo, using light-driven enzymatic reactions. This framework sets the foundation for future development in the emerging field of photobiocatalysis.

“Photobiocatalysis is basically light-activated catalysis by enzymes. Without light, the target enzyme cannot catalyze a reaction. When light is added, the target enzyme will be activated,” said Huimin Zhao (BSD leader/CAMBERS/CGD/MMG), Steven L. Miller Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “We have published many papers showing that it is possible to combine photocatalysis with enzyme catalysis to create a new class of photoenzymes. These artificial photoenzymes can catalyze selective reactions that cannot be achieved by natural enzymes and are also very difficult, or sometimes even not possible, with chemical catalysis.”

New study unveils ultra-high sensitivity broadband flexible photodetectors

A research team, affiliated with UNIST, has unveiled a flexible photodetector, capable of converting light across a broad spectrum—from visible to near-infrared—into electrical signals. This innovation promises significant advancements in technologies that require simultaneous detection of object colors and internal structures or materials.

Led by Professor Changduk Yang from the Department of Energy & Chemical Engineering, the research team developed perovskite-organic heterojunction photodetectors (POH-PDs) that combine high sensitivity with exceptional accuracy in the near-infrared (NIR) region. The findings have been published in Advanced Functional Materials.

Photodetectors are essential components in numerous applications, including smartphone displays that automatically adjust brightness and security systems that utilize vein recognition.

Mapping ‘figure 8’ Fermi surfaces to pinpoint future chiral conductors

One of the biggest problems facing modern microelectronics is that computer chips can no longer be made arbitrarily smaller and more efficient. Materials used to date, such as copper, are reaching their limits because their resistivity increases dramatically when they become too small. Chiral materials could provide a solution here. These materials behave like left and right hands: they look almost identical and are mirror images of each other, but cannot be made to match.

“It is assumed that the resistivity in some chiral materials remains constant or even decreases as the chiral material becomes smaller. That is why we are working on using electronic chirality to develop materials for a new generation of microchips that are faster, more energy-efficient and more robust than today’s technologies,” says Professor Niels Schröter from the Institute of Physics at MLU. Until now, however, it has been difficult to produce thin layers of these materials without the left-and right-handed areas canceling each other out in their effects.

This is precisely where the new study, in which the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Halle was also involved, comes in. “For the first time, we have found materials that are not yet chiral themselves. However, they have the potential to be converted into electronically chiral materials with only a single-handedness through targeted distortion. These achiral materials can serve as so-called parent materials for engineering chiral conductors with reduced resistivity,” explains Schröter.

New Study Reveals How Nanoplastics Make Bacteria More Dangerous

Nanoplastics already raise fears because people can ingest them directly. Now scientists say these tiny particles can create a different kind of danger when they end up in water: they can help bacteria become tougher and harder to remove.

A study in Water Research led by Virginia Tech’s Jingqiu Liao, working with international collaborators, found that nanoplastics can influence how environmental microbes behave in ways that may indirectly affect human health. The concern is not just what the particles might do in the body, but what they might encourage in the water systems people rely on every day.

“It is very important to better understand the adverse effects of the nanoplastics on human health, and not just in humans but also in the environment, which indirectly influences human health,” said Liao, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. “The nanoplastics can make the antimicrobial-resistant pathogens better survive, which could be harmful to the environment and would have public health implications.”

‘Goldilocks size’ rhodium clusters advance reusable heterogeneous catalysts for hydroformylation

Recent research has demonstrated that a rhodium (Rh) cluster of an optimal, intermediate size—neither too small nor too large—exhibits the highest catalytic activity in hydroformylation reactions. Similar to the concept of finding the “just right” balance, the study identifies this so-called “Goldilocks size” as crucial for maximizing catalyst efficiency. The study is published in the journal ACS Catalysis and was featured as the cover story.

Led by Professor Kwangjin An from the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, in collaboration with Professor Jeong Woo Han from Seoul National University, the research demonstrates that when Rh exists as a cluster —comprising about 10 atoms—it outperforms both single-atom and nanoparticle forms in reaction speed and activity.

Hydroformylation is a vital industrial process used for producing raw materials for plastics, detergents, and other chemicals. Currently, many Rh catalysts are homogeneous—dissolved in liquids—which complicates separation and recycling. This challenge has driven efforts to develop solid, heterogeneous Rh catalysts that are easier to recover and reuse.

From stellar engines to Dyson bubbles, alien megastructures could hold themselves together under the right conditions

New theoretical models have strengthened the case that immense, energy-harvesting structures orbiting their host stars could exist in principle in distant stellar systems. With the right engineering precautions, calculations published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, carried out by Colin McInnes at the University of Glasgow, show that both stellar engines and Dyson bubbles can become gravitationally stable, allowing them to tap into the vast amounts of energy emitted by their host stars.

For decades, astronomers have pondered the possibility of alien civilizations far more technologically advanced than our own. While these studies remain entirely speculative, many have converged on similar ideas for harvesting stellar energy: envisioning vast structures deployed around host stars.

If such structures could exist, they would provide civilizations with vastly more energy than any planet could offer—enough for ventures ranging from the terraforming of new worlds, to interstellar journeys spanning many generations.

A new route to synthesize multiple functionalized carbon nanohoops

The field of nanomaterials is witnessing a transformative shift at the intersection of organic chemistry and molecular engineering. Among the most promising molecular structures are carbon nanohoops, of which [n]cycloparaphenylenes ([n]CPPs) are a representative example.

These ring-shaped structures represent the smallest possible slices of carbon nanotubes, which themselves are a widely renowned material of the 21st century.

Given that their structures can, in principle, be precisely tuned at the atomic level, nanohoops hold great potential as molecular components for next-generation optoelectronic devices, including high-resolution displays, photonic circuits, and responsive sensing materials.

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