Bio-Based Ideas

Yet another interesting, TED talk!

Today's blog post is not about any bio-based events, I attended. It's not about any great ideas, or moving news either. This time I thought I would just briefly touch upon what happened in the last few weeks. For me the end of graduate school was also accompanied by some anxiety of what would come afterwards. But I also realized that it is an opportunity to make changes for the better in that I have a chance again to pick a direction I like. And so I searched every possibility that would bring me closer to starting a career in the bio-based biotechnology industry. The result? I am very happy to have been selected for a Molecular Biology internship for the next 3-4 months (until the end of November and the beginning of December)! I was told that quite a few people interviewed for this position but did not get it. Not knowing anyone at Amyris previously, I consider myself very lucky. Having been picked for this internship out of all the people is also both a humbling experie...

Recently, NPR radio was talking about a plan of how the military plan might become more sustainable and made the point that the plan was still nebulous apart from some general goals. This reminded me that I still wanted to summarize some of the talks from the SD-CAP 2011 meeting I went to earlier this year. The first talk came from the keynote speaker, General Kamin, who was talking about the NAVI’s efforts on reducing the dependence on foreign oil within the NAVI. He started by pointing out that with a large amount of submarines, operational aircraft, and troops, the NAVI is very energy dependent – most of which comes from petroleum. To put things in perspective, the NAVI uses 25% of all the energy within the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense itself uses 93% of all the energy the government is using. Because the price for energy was low historically, efficiency has not been an issue until now. General Kamin went on to highlight that the Navi has increased it...

This video made me go, "hmmm, very interesting!". It reminded me of a talk by Cheryl Hayashi at Cal State Fullerton in which she talked about properties of spider silk. Anyway, the reason I am posting this video here is because silk is another one of those bio-based materials that although known for a long time, have huge potential for alternative uses in the future.

Example of how ciliates look (Source: http://www.woodrow.org) This week, DW Radio covered an interesting topic in their science news radio show. In light of the recent EHEC outbreak in Germany, experts have been trying to trace the source of this deadly outbreak. For those who do not know what EHEC is, it stands for Enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli. In other words, these special strains of E. coli are very tough bugs that can cause intestinal bleeding - obviously not desirable and potentially dangerous. The search for possible sources has lead back to water treatment plants because the majority of water treatment plants treat water according to ecological aspects only, that is to say, they ensure that nutrients and waste in the water do not exceed certain levels. Many German water-treatment plants do not specifically try to reduce the number of bacteria in the water. That part is left to water companies that produce drinking water. The result is that high concentrations of...

With my thesis defense coming up this Monday, I really did not have as much time to share all the interesting things I came across lately. But I did not want to miss the chance to make a quick note to myself and the readers of this site of an interesting paper, titled "DNA-based programming of quantum dot valency, self-assembly and luminescence" just published in Nature Nanotechnology . Grigory Tikhomirov et al. report "the self-assembly of quantum dot complexes using cadmium telluride nanocrystals capped with specific sequences of DNA. Quantum dots with between one and five DNA-based binding sites are synthesized and then used as building blocks to create a variety of rationally designed assemblies, including cross-shaped complexes containing three different types of dots...Through changes in pH, the conformation of the complexes can also be reversibly switched, turning on and off the transfer of energy between the constituent quantum dots." In other w...

This is just a quick note on what's caught my eye in the last day or so: Two researchers from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston successfully created what they call a "living laser". How did they use a living cell as a laser? I realized that I didn't exactly how a laser worked so I looked it up on Wiki. According to Wikipedia , "Laser" stands for " L ight A mplification by S timulated E mission or R adiation". To build a laser, you basically need a light source, some device that absorbs the original light source and then emits an amplified signal also called "gain medium". The key to lasers is that the light is uniform and does not scatter all over the place - it's one bundle of light. This is performed be some complicated sets of optical mirrors. Normally, crystals (like ruby) are used for the gain medium, but in this case, a kidney cell expressing GFP was used. So technically, a cell does n...