Imitating portions of the process of natural selection has led to the production of novel enzyme function.

By combining elements of protein engineering and directed evolution, researchers open the door to creating enzymes with diverse catalytic functions in a protein scaffold of their choice.

Hak-Sung Kim from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology recently described SIAFE – simultaneous incorporation and adjustment of functional elements. Reducing an enzyme to functional elements, then adjusting one element through random mutation, he was able to evolve new functionality from a well known enzyme. The parthway has great potential for directed evolution of enzymes that perform useful tasks.

Improving evolution - Nature Methods (subscription required)

The National Science Foundation has a CAREER award that rewards particularly promising young scientists with a 5 year (rather than the standard three year) research grant. The University of Delaware’s  Xinyan Deng has won one to study robotic flies.

…one of the goals of the research is to study the flight attributes observed in insects and to investigate the underlying principles that result in flight stability and also lead to differences in performance in order to develop a methodology and guidelines for designing flapping-wing microaerial vehicles.

Beside mathematical modeling and theoretical studies, Deng hopes to design and fabricate workable flapping-wing microaerial vehicles, or miniature flying robots, that are capable of stable and maneuverable flight with biomimetic sensors.

UD Press Release

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank based in Washington DC did a survey and found that there are more commercially available nanotech products.

Maynard and his co-workers found 212 products that use nanotechnology. This is double the number found by a similar survey carried out last year by EmTech Research, a pro-industry research group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Nearly half of these products were creams, cosmetics and supplements, designed to be applied to the skin or taken orally.

Nanobio is but a small subset of nanotech, but the increasing commercial viability has to be a good sign for the field.

Nature article (subscription required).

An interesting PDF by Roderick Wallace in which he makes a prediction about the uses of the first biomimetic artificial intelligence systems…to wit that they will be terribly unstable and prone to psychoses.

“The most likely use of the first generations of conscious machines will be to model the various forms of psychopathology, since we have little or no understanding of how consciousness is stabilized in humans or other animals.”

Psychopathic Robots Predicted. (robots.net)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been funding several labs interested in basic sensory biology.  Their goal is to define a system that will allow remote control of a free swimming shark.  The project has been under way for two years now with the major focus on the olfactory and the electrosensory systems.   A recent meeting of the research group held in Hawaii has been reported in the New Scientist.  Jelle Atema, better known for working on lobsters, has successfully implanted an electrode in each olfactory tract that causes a shark to veer one way or another.  Tim Tricas is attempting similar things with the electrosensory system but is not yet able to build the interface with the shark.  There are apparently trials scheduled for the Atema system to be held in open ocean off Florida. 

New Scientist Article

Tricas Lab

The word biophotonics deserves a definition page on this blog.  I’ll get to that presently.  Before I do here is a site that takes a similarly broad view of the field to my own.  The University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute has a biophotonics initiative that includes the following fields:

* optical molecular motors (+ overview of computational biophotonics) (E. Gehrig and O. Hess)
* ultrafast imaging, spectroscopy and control (J. Allam)
* two-photon imaging (J. McFadden)
* applications related to wide band gap materials (D. Lancefield)
* application of optical-fibre techniques in biomedicine (A. Rogers)
* solvent effects in protein folding (?) (D. Faux)
* VCSELs for high power applications in medicine and sensing; tuneable devices for in-situ spectrometers. (S. Sweeney / T. Sale)
* ultrafast circular dichroism for biomolecular spectroscopy (B.Murdin)
* photodynamic therapy (S. Sweeney)
* new nanofabrication facilities (D. Cox)

The fourth one down encompass all those articles I have posted on butterflies and diatoms.

ATI Biophotonics page

When some chlorophyll bearing algae are deprived of sulphur they switch from producing CO2 to producing hydrogen as a byproduct of photo synthesis.  A plant physiologist at Berkeley, Tasios Melis, has engineered these algae cells to produce hydrogen more efficiently.  He is elaborating on earlier work that discovered this switch…

“When we discovered the sulfur switch, we increased hydrogen production by a factor of 100,000. But to make it a commercial technology, we still had to increase the efficiency of the process by another factor of 100.”  -Michael Seibert, a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado

Though apparently the results are not published it could be a commercially viable use of a biological process to generate a renewable fuel.

Wired Article