How Would You Explain Synthetic Biology to Darwin?

Assistant Professor Nina Lin gave it a try (along with other scientists) on the Discovery Channel's Discovery Tech website.
(Check out slide 11!)

Artificial bone marrow that can continuously make red and white blood cells has been created in Nicholas Kotov's lab. This development could lead to simpler pharmaceutical drug testing, closer study of immune system defects, and a continuous supply of blood for transfusions. The marrow is not made to be implanted in the body, like most 3-D biomedical scaffolds. It is designed to function in a test tube.

A paper about these research findings was published in the February 2009 issue of Biomaterials.

Sharon Glotzer received a $4.3 million, five-year grant through a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship. This fellowship will allow Sharon and her students to use modeling and simulation to discover how to create shape-shifting materials from nanoparticles.
In the national security realm, such materials could be used for protective uniforms and gear, chemical detection, and stealth, for example. An aircraft conceivably could be painted with a material that changes its appearance as a chameleon does.

Researchers in the Department of Chemical Engineering have been working on a carbon nanotube-coated "smart yarn" that conducts electricity that could be woven into soft fabrics that detect blood and monitor health. Nick Kotov and Bongsup Shim, a doctoral student in the department, are among the co-authors of a paper on this material currently published online in Nano Letters.

"Currently, smart textiles are made primarily of metallic or optical fibers. They're fragile. They're not comfortable," says Kotov. "We have found a much simpler way [of creating smart textiles]-an elegant way-by combining two fibers, one natural and one created by nanotechnology."

Max Shtein received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award from the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy is the federal government's highest honor to early-career scientists and engineers.

Paul Podsiadlo, recent PhD graduate, was the winner of the 2008 Collegiate Inventors Competition in the graduate category. His invention "Ultra-Strong and Stiff, Optically Transparent Plastic Nanocomposites" was based on his doctoral research with Professor Nick Kotov on ultra-strong nanostructured composites.

Mark Burns' lab's make-your-own-microfluidic-device kit has been named one of The Scientist magazine's top 10 innovations of 2008. Minsoug Rhee, a graduate student in the Burns' group, developed the 16-piece set of microfluidic building blocks

The device, also known as a "lab-on-a-chip," integrates multiple laboratory functions onto one chip just millimeters or centimeters in size. The kit in essence brings the lab on a chip to the scientific masses. It cuts the costs and the time involved in making one from days to minutes. (Illustration above by Hanna Bae)(2008)

A new type of plastic coating made from vapor developed by Joerg Lahann and his research group (left) could lead to better biomedical devices such as stents and catheters that are "bioactive," meaning they can interact with the living cells around them in unique ways.The coating binds to a broad range of materials including glass, stainless steel, Teflon and silicon. More like a paint than a blanket, it is able to preserve the precise shape of the device it covers. The outer surface of the coating can be made to attract or repel certain molecules such as platelets or proteins. "We recognized that the biomedical devices have to be bioactive. You need to have biological signatures that can actively mitigate the response of the body to the implant," said Lahann, the Dow Corning Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering. (2008)

Ralph Yang has received the Department of Energy's (DOE) 2008 DOE Hydrogen Program R & D Award at the Annual Hydrogen Review Conference in Washington DC in June. This award was given to him for his "pioneering work on hydrogen storage by spillover."

The hydrogen spillover phenomenon that occurs in many catalytic reactions has been known to exist for over 40 years. About 7 years ago, Dr. Yang started using this phenomenon to develop sorbents for hydrogen storage at ambient temperature, which could be used in future fuel cell cars. Few thought this approach would work, but Yang and his research group were able to show promising results under the DOE sponsorship and now over 30 research groups around the world are following their approach in the search for new materials for hydrogen storage. (2008)

Scott Fogler was named by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) as one of the "Thirty Authors of Groundbreaking Chemical Engineering Books" for his widely used textbook Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering. (2008)

Walt Weber was chosen as one of the American Institute of Chemical Engineer's (AIChE) "One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era" in honor of his many accomplishments in the area of environmental process dynamics & system sustainability. (2008)

Nick Kotov and his group have won a NASA Nanotech Briefs Nano 50 Award for their work on Ultrastrong Layered Polymer Nanocomposites. Nanotech Briefs is a digital newsletter on nanotechnology. Nick received the award for the group at a ceremony in November. (2008)

Suljo Linic is a recipient of the 2008 DuPont Young Professor award. Initiated in 1968, the DuPont award provides research support for three years. The award is awarded annually to 10-15 investigators worldwide, across multiple scientific disciplines. (2008)

Dr. Levi Thompson is engrossed in one of the most socially important realms of engineering: finding ways to generate clean energy and reduce polluting emissions from autos and other products. He's a leader in the development of hydrogen fuel cell technology. And his work in catalysis could lead to solutions for our most pressing problems-energy, health care, and water. (2008)

Read the full story in Michigan Today.
Image: Chemical Engineering professor Levi Thompson pictured with a microfuel cell.)

A computer simulation performed by Aaron Keys and Dr. Sharon Glotzer has given new insights into how this unique class of solids forms. Quasicrystals incorporate clusters of atoms as they are, without rearranging them as regular crystals do. Crystals form when liquids freeze into solids. (2007)

The research findings were published in the December 6, 2007 of Physical Review Letters.

6-Mercaptopurine and its riboside derivatives are some of the most widely utilized anti-leukemic and anti-inflammatory drugs however their short biological half-life and severe side effects limit their use. Nicholas Kotov and two researchers from his group, Paul Podsiadlo and Vladimir Sinani, have developed a small, metallic gold-nanoparticle-based carrier for 6-mercaptopurine-9-β-D-ribofuranoside, a prodrug of 6-mercaptopurine with a goal of improving the drug's effectiveness. (2007)

Their research is featured in the January 15 issue of Langmuir

Nick Kotov , graduate student Paul Podsiadlo, and other U-M researchers created a composite plastic that's as strong as steel but lighter and transparent. It's made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue. Kotov and his collaborators are authors of a paper on this composite material published in the October 5, 2007 edition of Science . (2007)

Read full story from U-M News Service

UPDATE: This discovery made the list of Wired magazine's Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs for 2007

The Department of Chemical Engineering is proud to announce that Professor H. Scott Fogler was elected the national president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). Scott will serve as president-elect from January 1, 2008 - December 31, 2008, and as president, January 1, 2009 - December 31, 2009. We know he will continue to be proactive to move AIChE forward. (2007)

Results of work done by chemical engineering graduate student Weixian Shi and his advisor, Ron Larson were published in the June 2007 issue of Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications. Mr. Shi and Dr. Larson found that using atomic force microscopy (AFM), allowed them to discover RecA-single-stranded DNA (RecA-ssDNA) filaments, in the presence of single-stranded DNA-binding (SSB) protein, mostly organized into left-handed bundles. This finding differs from the previously reported disordered aggregates formed when SSB is excluded from the reaction. In addition, they observed both left-and right-handedness on bundles of two filaments." (2007)

Suljo Linic has been selected to receive this year's departmental excellence award for outstanding research, service, and teaching. He will be honored at the 2008 College Dinner Dance. Congratulations Professor Linic! (2007)

Recent advances in nano-biotechnology are leading to the design of functional probes that are able to self-orient relative to a cell surface, thereby encoding-and ultimately revealing-useful biological information. Many methods have been reported on the fabrication of anisotropic particles, such as Janus particles--two-sided particles with different material compositions in each side. Jeorg Lahann and two researchers from his group, Mutsumi Yoshida and Kyung-Ho Roh, have pursued an alternative route toward the design and synthesis of polymer-based nanoparticles with two or multiple distinct phases, using electrified co-jetting. (2007)

The team's findings are the cover article the May 8 issue of Langmuir.

A surprising discovery at the University of Michigan about how nanoparticles self-assemble into structures that resemble viruses gives scientists key insight into how common disease producing viruses might form in our bodies. This new understanding brings researchers closer to making synthetic virus-like particles in the lab that could be used to help stop viruses from replicating, or could be used as stealth viruses to deliver drugs.

Using computer simulations, chemical engineering PhD student Ting Chen, research associate Zhenli Zhang, and Professor Sharon Glotzer self-assembled tiny particles into precise, convex shapes. (2007)

The team's findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
("A precise packing sequence for self-assembled convex structures," Chen, et al, PNAS, January 16, 2007, 104, 3, pp. 717-722.)

Polymers, large molecules comprised of chains of repeating structures, are used in everything from the coatings on walls of ships and pipes to reduce flow drag to gene therapy. (Image courtesy of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) But long polymer chains are subject to breakage, called scission, and a new study conducted by Michael Solomon, Steven Ceccio, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and former ChE doctoral student, Siva Vanapalli, shows that as it turns out, much of what scientists previously thought about why polymers break when subjected to strong flows, such as waves crashing against a ship's bow, was wrong. (2006)

Their research results appeared in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (From U-M News Service)

"Universal scaling for polymer chain scission in turbulence," Vanapalli, S. A. , S. L. Ceccio, and M. J. Solomon, PNAS 2006 103: 16617-16618.

How to direct and control the self-assembly of nanoparticles is a fundamental question in nanotechnology. Sharon Glotzer and Nicholas Kotov have discovered a way to make nanocrystals in a fluid spontaneously assemble into free-floating sheets the same way some protein structures form in living organisms.

A paper on the findings co-authored by Kotov, Glotzer, and their students and postdoctoral researchers, will appear in the journal Science, on Oct. 13. (2006)

Joerg Lahann and his graduate student, David Peng, are developing a device to test breath for the presence of metabolites associated with breast cancer. The cornerstone of the device, and what makes it possible, is the switchable surface technology first developed in Lahann's lab while a post doctoral student at MIT. (2006)

Also, see the Lahann Group web page for up-to-date information about their research