Talks Part 3: Biomaterials

Another talk that was particularly interesting was Angela Belcher’s Grace Hopper lecture on “Genetic Control of the Synthesis and Assembly of Materials for Electronics and Energy”. I’m not going to post much on it save for a number of references, because I’ve been aware of a lot of her group’s work for a good deal of time now. In general, what they do is try to combine man-made fabrication tools and the specificity inherent in living systems (via millions of years of evolution) to figure out easy, controllable, environmentally-friendly ways to make new materials for a variety of purposes. I was particularly struck by her emphasis on the simplicity of everything they do - if it can’t be transferred to industry or undergrad labs within several years, they won’t do it, which is an interesting philosophy. Anyway, one of the particularly cool things Prof. Belcher’s group has come up with recently is the use of viruses to direct the formation of nanowires, and they’ve been working to use them to make things like self-assembling, cheap and efficient Li-ion batteries. This kind of work definitely appeals to the part of me that likes science because of all the neat things that it enables us to make. Anyway, here are some of her publications that I’ve found most useful:

- B. D. Reiss et al., “Biological Routes to Metal Alloy Ferromagnetic Nanostructures“, Nano Lett. 4 1127 (2004).
- S. Jaffar et al., “Layer-by-Layer Surface Modification and Patterned Electrostatic Deposition of Quantum Dots“, Nano Lett. 4 1421 (2004).
- P. J. Yoo et al., “Spontaneous assembly of viruses on multilayered polymer surfaces“, Nature Materials 5 234 (2006).
- K. T. Nam et al., “Virus-Enabled Synthesis and Assembly of Nanowires for Lithium Ion Battery Electrodes“, Science 312 885 (2006).
- Y. Huang et al., “Programmable Assembly of Nanoarchitectures Using Genetically Engineered Viruses“, Nano Lett. 5 1429 (2005).
- C. Mao et al., “Viral assembly of oriented quantum dot nanowires“, PNAS 100 6946 (2003).