Nano-enabled Biological Materials

Nano-materials Enabled Thermoelectricity from Window Glasses

With a projection of nearly doubling up the world population by 2050, we need wide variety of renewable and clean energy sources to meet the increased energy demand. Solar energy is considered as the leading promising alternate energy source with the pertinent challenge of off sunshine period and uneven worldwide distribution of usable sun light. Although thermoelectricity is considered as a re...

Nano-Enabled Photovoltaics. Progress in Materials and Methodologies.

NANO- AND MICROMECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF HIERARCHICAL BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS Nano- and micromechanical properties of hierarchical biological materials and tissues

The mechanical properties of biological materials have been the focal point of extensive studies over the past decades, leading to formation of a new research field that intimately connects biology, chemistry and materials science. Significant advances have been made in many disciplines and research areas, ranging throughout a variety of material scales, from atomistic, molecular up to continuu...

Nano-enabled synthetic biology

Biological systems display a functional diversity, density and efficiency that make them a paradigm for synthetic systems. In natural systems, the cell is the elemental unit and efforts to emulate cells, their components, and organization have relied primarily on the use of bioorganic materials. Impressive advances have been made towards assembling simple genetic systems within cellular scale c...

Nano-FTIR chemical mapping of minerals in biological materials

Methods for imaging of nanocomposites based on X-ray, electron, tunneling or force microscopy provide information about the shapes of nanoparticles; however, all of these methods fail on chemical recognition. Neither do they allow local identification of mineral type. We demonstrate that infrared near-field microscopy solves these requirements at 20 nm spatial resolution, highlighting, in its f...