In the absence of effective endogenous repair mechanisms after cardiac injury, cell-based therapies have rapidly emerged as a potential novel therapeutic approach in ischaemic heart disease. After the initial characterization of putative endothelial progenitor cells and their potential to promote cardiac neovascularization and to attenuate ischaemic injury, a decade of intense research has exam...

What is bionanoscience (or bionanotechnology)? It is the nexus where the worlds of solid state, chemistry, and biology uniteVBto boldly go where no engineer, chemist, or biologist would have gone alone.[ Broadly defined as biomedical applications of nanotechnology, it is a highly interdisciplinary field that draws upon expertise and knowledge from a host of conventional subdisciplines within en...

Department for Geoand Environmental Sciences, GeobioCenter and Center for Nanoscience, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Theresienstrasse 41, 80333 München, Germany *E-mail: [email protected] URL: www.nanobiomed.de Over the last 15 years, the use of atomic force microscopy (AFM) has spread from the materials science of hard matter to the fields of biology and biomolecular research....

DNA is well-known as bearer of the genetic code. Since its structure elucidation nearly seven decades ago by Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin, much has been learned about its detailed structure, function, and genetic coding. The development of automated solid-phase synthesis, and with it the availability of synthetic DNA with any desired sequence in lengths of up to hundreds of bases in the...

Novel applications of nanostructures in catalysis, electronics, photonics, and bionanotechnology are driving the exploration of synthetic approaches to control and manipulate their chemical composition, structure, and morphology. As well as the design of synthetic strategies to produce a new class of nanoscale materials, recent developments have enabled the chemical transformation of one crysta...

BACKGROUND Due to their natural tendency to self-assemble, proteins and peptides are important components for organic nanotechnology. One particular class of peptides of recent interest is those that form amyloid fibrils, as this self-assembly results in extremely strong, stable quasi-one-dimensional structures which can be used to organise a wide range of cargo species including proteins and o...

The design and engineering of self-assembled peptide-based materials is receiving increasing attention in materials science. This is partly because of the inspiration that biological materials provide to materials scientists; our improved ability to design, engineer and characterize peptides and proteins in general over the past decade; and the variety of potential applications for such materia...

Attempts to apply nanotechnology in agriculture began with the growing realization that conventional farming technologies would neither be able to increase productivity any further nor restore ecosystems damaged by existing technologies back to their pristine state; in particular because the long-term effects of farming with "miracle seeds", in conjunction with irrigation, fertilizers, and pest...

Surfaces resistant to protein adsorption are very desirable for a variety of applications in biomedical engineering and bionanotechnology, since protein adsorption is often the first step in a cascade of events leading to systems failure. Initial efforts to create adsorption-resistant surfaces succeeded in reducing the adsorption by 80% compared to untreated surfaces to 100 ng cm by employing p...

Hybrid copolymers, which contain segments with distinct structures and properties, are useful materials in various applications such as novel plastics, polymeric catalysis, smart materials, self-assembly, and bionanotechnology. They can be prepared through conjugation of hybrid polymeric segments or polymerization with corresponding initiators. The latter approach is particularly attractive as ...