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Nanotechnology offers unique opportunities to advance the life sciences by facilitating the delivery, manipulation and observation of biological materials with unprecedented resolution. The ability to pattern nanoscale arrays of biological material assists studies of genomics, proteomics and cell adhesion, and may be applied to achieve increased sensitivity in drug screening and disease detection, even when sample volumes are severely limited.
Unfortunately, most tools capable of patterning with such tiny resolution were developed for the silicon microelectronics industry and cannot be used for soft and relatively sensitive biomaterials such as DNA and proteins.
Now a team of researchers at Northwestern University has demonstrated the ability to rapidly write nanoscale protein arrays using a tool they call the nanofountain probe (NFP).
"The NFP works much like a fountain pen, only on a much smaller scale, and in this case, the ink is the protein solution," said Horacio Espinosa, head of the research team and professor of mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern.
The results, which will be published online the week of Oct. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), include demonstrations of sub-100-nanometer protein dots and sub-200-nanometer line arrays written using the NFP at rates as high as 80 microns/second.
Each nanofountain probe chip has a set of ink reservoirs that hold the solution to be patterned. Like a fountain pen, the ink is transported to sharp writing probes through a series of microchannels and deposited on the substrate in liquid form.
"This is important for a number of reasons," said Owen Loh, a graduate student at Northwestern who co-authored the paper with fellow student Andrea Ho. "By maintaining the sensitive proteins in a liquid buffer, their biological function is less likely to be affected. This also means we can write for extended periods over large areas without replenishing the ink."
Earlier demonstrations of the NFP by the Northwestern team included directly writing organic and inorganic materials on a number of different substrates. These included suspensions of gold nanoparticles, thiols and DNA patterned on metallic- and silicon-based substrates.
In the case of protein deposition, the team found that by applying an electrical field between the nanofountain probe and substrate, they could control the transport of protein to the substrate. Without the use of electric fields, protein deposition was relatively slow and sporadic. However, with proper electrical bias, protein dot and line arrays could be deposited at extremely high rates.
"The use of electric fields allows an additional degree of control," Espinosa said. "We were able to create dot and line arrays with a combination of speed and resolution not possible using other techniques."
Positively charged proteins can be maintained inside the fountain probe by applying a negative potential to the NFP reservoirs with respect to a substrate. Reversing the applied potential then allows protein molecules to be deposited at a desired site.
To maximize the patterning resolution and efficiency, the team relied on computational models of the deposition process. "By modeling the ink flow within the probe tip, we were able to get a sense of what conditions would yield optimal patterns," says Jee Rim, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern.
Espinosa collaborated closely with Neelesh Patankar, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern, and Punit Kohli, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
"We are very excited by these results," said Espinosa. "This technique is very broadly applicable, and we are pursuing it on a number of fronts." These include single-cell biological studies and direct-write fabrication of large-scale arrays of nanoelectrical and nanoelectromechanical devices.
"The fact that we can batch fabricate large arrays of these fountain probes means we can directly write large numbers of features in parallel," added Espinosa. "The demonstration of rapid protein deposition rates further supports our efforts in producing a large-scale nanomanufacturing tool."
The paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was authored by Loh, Ho, Rim, Patankar, Kohli and Espinosa.

In the field of nano agriculture, it is believed that it could hurt small-scale farmers who supply the world with small-scale raw materials.
ETC Group or the Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration executive director Pat Mooney, in his briefing with members of the Davao media, Mooney shared the impacts it could cause the world especially those in the Third World.
With the advent of nanotechnology or the manipulation of matter at the level of atoms and molecules, ETC has seen how such technology would change every step of the food chain as well as the people involved in the process.
Mooney explained that the highly-developed countries lead the world market, however, they still recognize and get raw materials from other countries like the Third World.
But with nanotechnology, where the power and manipulation is at the hands of the scientifically-advanced, the group is seeing a rapid change in the world's economy.
The expert disclosed Kraft Foods' move of coming up with a product that would automatically change clear water to any kind of drink like soda, coffee, or tea in just a matter of click on the microwave machine.
"This product will soon flood the grocery stores and would eventually kill all other beverage products as well as the farmers who provide the raw materials," he said.
ETC is now mindful on the world's $3 trillion food retail market, agricultural export markets valued at $544 billion, and the livelihood of some 2.6 billion farming people.
It is believed that the poor and marginalized are seldom in a position to foresee or adjust quickly to abrupt economic changes.
"Among the most vulnerable will be small-scale farmers and agricultural workers who produce raw commodity exports in the developing world.
Mooney visited Philippines to talk to different sectors in the community and share vital information needed by the public to prepare them for the big changes in the world market.
In the field of nano-foods, huge companies have started to invest on their research department to explore nano-scales by enhancing the taste and adding health benefits without having to add production cost.
An example cited is a beverage that claims no sugar in it but actually adds an enzyme that is capable in blocking some bitter taste buds.
He urged the government to share these information to the Filipino people and let them start preparing for the coming changes.
"The technology is moving so fast and yet our policymakers are so left behind. The people deserve to know all these," he said.
The world now estimates about 800 manufacturer-identified consumer products that use nanotechnology. These are already being sold in the world market in the absence of regulation and monitoring.
Data showed that the nanotech market for food and processing alone is estimated to be in excess of $2 billion and projected to surge to more than $20 billion by 2010.

Over the course of the past year, new reports have revealed the asbestos-like qualities of carbon nanotubes and their potential ability to cause mesothelioma (a cancer almost exclusively caused by asbestos exposure).
However, the research is by no means conclusive. One insurance company, Continental Western Insurance Group, has responded by saying they will exclude coverage of nanotechnology starting in November. The company’s reason for this is due to the “Unknown and unknowable risks created by the products and processes that involved nanotubes.”
The statement from the insurance company says, “Reports have raised concerns regarding health risks from workers that may be inhaling carbon nanotubes during the manufacture of certain products. The carbon nanotubes resemble asbestos fibers in appearance, raising the concern that they may cause illness similar to that linked to asbestos.”
CWG plans to attach a nanotube exclusion to all policy issues for business owners, motor carriers, and other various insurance products. The company has also called for further research into the possible long-term consequences of being exposed to nanotubes.
The result of current research is far from being conclusive. One study showed nanotubes caused lesions similar to those caused by asbestos, but involved the implantation of nanotube fibers into experimental rats. Another study suggested that only carbon nanotubes of a particular long, thin, shape have the potential to cause malignant mesothelioma.
Some believe CWG is just trying to save money by using the word “asbestos” as a trigger-word and relating it to carbon nanotubes. Insurance companies in the past have paid out big money due to asbestos-related claims concerning asbestosis, lung cancer, and pleural mesothelioma.
The EPA, as well as other environmental groups, are concerned about the possible consequences of the use of nanotechnology. However, Vicki Colvin, director of the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, says the potential benefits of carbon nanotubes are simply too powerful to ignore.

“The purpose of development of nano is to create wealth and increase the life quality,” said the vice-secretary of the special headquarters of nanotechnology.
“Iran should be able to reach the 15th grade in this technology by the next 10 years and should directly earn 10 billion Dollars,” added Saaber Mirzaaei.
“Creating electron-based microscopes which are of the complicated measuring systems are of the most successful achievements were reached by nanotechnology,” he continued.
“A special particular fund has devoted for this in order to support the active people of the field,” he affirmed.
“In the year 2000, Iran was the world’s 60th country and Islamic countries’ 6th and is 20th in the world and first among the Islamic countries, in 2008,” stated Mirzaaei.
A festival for exhibiting abilities of nanotechnology has opened today in the Center for Mental Culture of Children and Youth, located in the street “Hejaab” of Tehran and will be continued until the 24th of the month Mehr.
Reported By: Mojgan Sattar
Translated By: Aref Mohammadzadeh

Dr. Hermann E. Gaub, head of the Biophysics and Molecular Materials Group in the Physics Department at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) of Munich, together with Elias Puchner and colleagues from the university's Center for Nanoscience and the Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich, combined the precision of atomic force microsccopy with the selectivity of DNA interaction to create freely programmable nanopatterns of DNA-oligomers on a surface and in aqueous environment.
What the LMU researchers did was create a DNA scaffold by picking biotin bearing DNA oligomers with an AFM tip and depositing them, one by one, in a desired pattern on a surface, basically creating a pattern of attachment points for fluorescent semiconductor nanoparticles conjugated with streptavidin. The small bacterial protein streptavidin is commonly used for the detection of various biomolecules and it binds with high affinity to the vitamin biotin. The strong streptavidin-biotin bond can be used to attach various biomolecules to one another or onto a solid support.
When the sample with the DNA scaffold is incubated with a solution of fluorescent nanoparticles, a rapid self-assembly process of these particles on the predefined scaffold takes place.

Having a nanotechnology lab boasting $100,000 microscopes represents a giant leap for a university that 50 years ago sprouted amid orange groves and squash fields.
"It was all temporary buildings then, maybe 2,000 people on the entire campus," said Vince Barabba, a member of the school's founding class. "It was a close-knit environment where students and faculty came together. It was a rare opportunity to start a college with a clean slate."
Now, as the school celebrates its 50th anniversary, it is also engaging in its largest construction boom ever, including the addition of a $100 million performing arts center. And its enrollment has grown more than tenfold since those early days, reaching a record 36,600 this fall.
"We have had about 190,000 alums in 50 years. We are educating more teachers than the entire UC system and we are one of the largest employers in the San Fernando Valley, employing about 4,000 people," said CSUN President Jolene Koester. "This university has always been focused on this region."
But in many ways, the Valley's only public university is still a campus trying to find its way.
Koester's plans for the college include becoming a nationally recognized institution.
"Forever there have been conflicting visions of what this college should become," said John
Broesamle, a former CSUN history professor and author of the book "Suddenly a Giant: A History of California State University, Northridge."
From its inception, founding members of the school saw CSUN as competitive with UCLA and the University of Southern California, he said.
A satellite version of the school started in 1955 out of rented space in San Fernando High School. The first president's office was out of his car's front seat, Broesamle said.
CSUN's humble start, coupled with its suburban location, led many to think of the school as a small, semirural liberal arts college.
"But the small college in a rural environment was not sustainable," Broesamle said.
As the North Valley's fields gave way to tract homes, apartments and retail stores after World War II, CSUN also evolved.
The college began to plow its green space to make room for new classrooms, a library and student housing, and students began to ask for change inside the classroom.
By 1968, it felt its first round of growing pains when African-American and Chicano students, encouraged by the nation's ongoing civil rights movement, started protesting the school's lack of minorities.
Tensions reached a boiling point Nov. 4 that year when members of CSUN's Black Student Union accused a volunteer football coach of discrimination against a black football player.
They took over the fifth floor of the campus administration building. More than 100 LAPD officers were called in, and it all ended peacefully.
"It's ironic that the university that always aspired to national recognition was first recognized nationally as a fountainhead of student protests," Broesamle said.
As a result, CSUN created Pan-African Studies and Chicano/Chicana Studies departments as part of the agreement reached between student leaders and administrators.
Rudy Acuna, the founding faculty member for the Chicano/Chicana Studies Department, said getting the programs off the ground was difficult.
"Those first three years were hell," Acuna said. "Police were engaged in racial profiling. Originally even the Spanish Department objected to our program. They thought the programs would go away, but we kept pushing."
Today, the program serves 5,000 students a semester and is one of the largest of its kind in the country.
In 1994, CSUN was faced with a different kind of movement when the 6.7-magnitude Northridge Earthquake left most of the campus in rubble, with more than $300 million worth of damage.
It reopened weeks later in temporary bungalows with a lower enrollment, but 14 years later it has fully recovered.
Looking ahead, the college faces many challenges. As the Valley continues to diversify, CSUN has to adjust its programs to its changing student body.
Tom Spencer-Walters, chairman of the Pan-African Studies Department, said while minority programs have flourished - now including departments for women's studies, Asian-American studies, Central-American studies and most recently queer studies - the recruitment of minority faculty continues to be an issue.
"If ethnic studies were not on the campus, we would not be meeting our diversity objectives with faculty," Spencer-Walters said.
The current state budget crunch is also a growing issue for a college where more than half of the students are on financial aid.
"When I registered in the fall of 2005 my fees, with everything included, were about $1,500. ... Now they are almost $2,000," said Raul Marquez, 21, a 21 year-old senior majoring in kinesiology.
"I know we are getting a new science building, parking structure and a performance hall, but it seems like an inordinate amount of money in a small time frame. I hope CSUN continues to think about the college as a center for education, not a business."
For many, like nanotechnology professor Henk Postma, the mission remains clear. A Caltech doctoral graduate, he could have taught students the intricacies of the nanometer at pretty much any college.
But the Netherlands native said CSUN held a special attraction for him.
"I like the fact that we are teaching these types of students who typically don't go to research institutions - first-generation students," he said. "It's so important to engage these types of students."

This week Nature Nanotechnology journal reveals how scientists from the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) at UCL are using a novel nanomechanical approach to investigate the workings of vancomycin, one of the few antibiotics that can be used to combat so-called ‘superbugs’, such as MRSA.
The researchers, led by Dr Rachel McKendry and Professor Gabriel Aeppli, developed ultra-sensitive probes capable of providing new insight into how antibiotics work, paving the way for the development of more effective new drugs.
“There has been an alarming growth in antibiotic-resistant hospital superbugs such as MRSA and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE),” said Dr McKendry. “This is a major global health problem and is driving the development of new technologies to investigate antibiotics and how they work.
“The cell wall of these bugs is weakened by the antibiotic, ultimately killing the bacteria,” she continued.
“Our research on cantilever sensors – tiny levers no wider than a human hair – suggests that the cell wall is disrupted by a combination of a local antibiotic and a polymer known as a mucopeptide binding together, and the spatial mechanical connectivity of these events.
“Investigating both these binding and mechanical influences on the cells’ structure could lead to the development of more powerful and effective antibiotics in future.”
During the study Dr McKendry, Joseph Ndieyira, Moyu Watari and co-workers used these cantilever arrays to examine the process that ordinarily takes place in the body when vancomycin binds itself to the surface of the bacteria.
They coated the cantilever array with polymers known as mucopeptides from bacterial cell walls and found that, as the antibiotic attaches itself it generates a surface stress on the bacteria, which can be detected by a tiny bending of the cantilever sensors.
The team suggests that this stress contributes to the disruption of the cell walls and the breakdown of the bacteria.
The interdisciplinary team went on to compare how vancomycin interacts with both non-resistant and resistant strains of bacteria. The ‘superbugs’ are resistant to antibiotics because of a simple mutation that deletes a single hydrogen bond from the structure of their cell walls.
This small change makes it approximately 1,000 times harder for the antibiotic to attach itself to the bug, leaving it much less able to disrupt the cells’ structure, and therefore therapeutically ineffective.
“This work at the LCN demonstrates the effectiveness of silicon-based cantilevers for drug screening applications,” says Professor Gabriel Aeppli, Director of the LCN.
“According to the Health Protection Agency, during 2007 there were around 7,000 cases of MRSA and more than a thousand cases of VRE in England alone. In recent decades the introduction of new antibiotics has slowed to a trickle but without effective new drugs the number of these fatal infections will increase.”
The research was funded by the EPSRC (Speculative Engineering Programme), the IRC in Nanotechnology (Cambridge, UCL and Bristol), the Royal Society and the BBSRC.

The tiny ultra-sensitive probes can measure how well a drug binds to bacteria and its ability to weaken and destroy the bug.
The researchers tested the silicon-based technology on vancomycin, one of the few remaining antibiotics against infections such as MRSA
The initial results are published in Nature Nanotechnology.
It is the first time this type of nanotechnology has been used in screening for new drugs. The probes are no wider than a human hair - which may seem big by nanotechnology standards - but they are able to detect minute changes at the molecular level.
Antibiotics such as vancomycin bind to the bacterial cell wall, disrupting it and causing the bacteria to break down.
When bacteria become resistant, small changes occur in the structure of their cell wall making it far harder for the antibiotic to latch on and weaken the structure of the cell.
'Surface stress'
The researchers from the London Centre for Nanotechnology coated a series of the nanoprobes with the proteins that make up bacterial cell walls.
Like a tiny row of diving boards, the probes bend in response to the "surface stress" that occurs when the antibiotic binds to the cell.
The system was able to detect that it is 1,000 times harder for vancomycin to attach to resistant bacteria than to non-resistant bacteria.
They are now screening other potential antibiotics with the goal of finding a drug that is able to bind strongly to resistant bacteria and cause substantial structural weaknesses to the cell wall.
Study leader Dr Rachel McKendry said: "There has been an alarming growth in antibiotic-resistant hospital 'superbugs' such as MRSA and vancomycin resistant Enterococci (VRE).
"This a major global health problem and is driving the development of new technologies to investigate antibiotics and how they work."
She added that different drugs caused different structural weaknesses in the cell wall - some of which were more effective than others - and the nanotechnology they were using could help to pinpoint those that were likely to cause the most destruction.
Professor Jeff Errington, director of the Institute for Cell and Molecular Biosciences at the University of Newcastle said the technology was very interesting and obviously highly sensitive.
But he said it did not solve the problem of finding new antibiotics to test in the first place.
"The bottleneck is in finding new molecules that kill bacteria by novel pathways," he said.

1. Less resources force innovators to look for simpler more economical solutions.
Most invention is incremental in nature and build upon decades of earlier developments. For example, the techniques to manufacture integrated circuits have been developed over about 50 years and while the improvements in these techniques have been significant and have led to cheaper and more efficient electronics, the manufacturing cost and complexity have increased at a similar pace in accordance with Moore’s 2nd law. Semiconductor and electronics companies faced with a rapid decline in capital may be forced to look for dramatically different approaches to fabrication in order to stay in business. It is very likely that nanomaterials and nanolithographic techniques may play a key role in such new fabrication.
2. Nanotech. start-ups will be forced to focus on applications rather than on pure materials.
With less venture capital to go around it is likely that investment will go to those companies having business plans with clearly identified markets and applications. Start-ups lacking such direction will be forced to reprioritize or go out of business. While harsh in the short term this could be a good thing in the long run leading to new market creation.
3. The fall of the stock market will weaken older, public companies allowing newer, non-public companies a competitive advantage.
Companies not relying on public stock have a strategic advantage and more freedom to operate than public companies. Meanwhile older, public companies which need to answer to shareholders will be forced to compromise and may be more willing to deal with newer companies offering cost-cutting solutions offered by nanomaterials. In addition, in good economic times, distributors may have no desire to work with new companies offering cost reduced products due to longstanding relationships with more established companies. However, when the economy declines to a sufficient degree the distributors may reprioritize and give more weight to cost reduction than customer relationships offering a window of opportunity to newer competitors.

We are going to list everyones idea on the concept of nanotechnology. Whether funny, off the wall or serious we would love to hear from you. All submissions will get your name and url acknowledged.
Here is one slightly understated submission - 'Nanotechnology is about small things'
So come on nanoviper's lets be hearing form you. You can use the form below. 100 words or less please. http://www.nanovip.com/contact
Read the results - http://www.nanovip.com/node/53670