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A lot of interesting biology naturally takes place at the nanoscale since that’s about how big macromolecules are. Nothing surprising there. But since nanotech underwent a big boom a few years ago (the graph says it all), a lot of people have rebranded their traditional research as nanotechnology. Despite the rebranding, there are some people who are doing some neat stuff that isn’t really included in traditional molecular biology or biophysics. Here’s a sprinkling or related material:
1) Carlo Montemagno, now at UCLA, uses single F1-ATPase motors to turn a nickel propeller. Publication is here (subscription required). News available here and here.
2) Angela Belcher at MIT makes viruses that deposit semiconductor materials in controlled ways. Her research page is well done, so there’s nothing left for me to do here. (UPDATE: Well, the research page used to be well done. As of the original posting it’s been updated and is somewhat less informative now. Oh well.)
3) Penn has a Nano-Bio interface center.
4) David Goodsell, known for accurate and beautiful water colours of cell interiors, wrote a book about it.
5) Science’s NextWave did a feature on it (subscription required – but if your university has a subscription to Science, then they probably also have a subscription to NextWave)
6) Cornell has a center for it.
7) And there’s even a journal.
Well that was just nanotastic wasn’t it?
Science of Gender and Science Molecule of the Month: Carotenoid Oxygenase
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
