Biotech

By Anne Stark, LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists are leveraging their extensive experience studying the movement of airborne hazards to better understand the movement of virus-like particles through the air and to identify effective countermeasures. While the burden of airborne diseases is known to be large, its true scope is underappreciated. LLNL researchers…

By Anne Wainscott-Sargent Georgia Institute of Technology The U.S. pulp and paper industry uses large quantities of water to produce cellulose pulp from trees. The water leaving the pulping process contains a number of organic byproducts and inorganic chemicals. To reuse the water and the chemicals, paper mills rely on steam-fed evaporators that boil up…

By Aliyah Kovner The planet is comprised of continents and islands, each with unique cultures and resources. One area may be well known for growing food, another for manufacturing building materials, and yet despite their differences and distance from one another, the regions are linked by global processes. Living cells are built on a similar…

Biocatalysts are essential to the catalysis of chemical reactions for food production, pharmaceuticals, specialty chemicals, renewable energy and environmental cleanup; with their importance reflected in a growing $10 billion industrial market. But current platforms for biocatalyst discovery are too slow. Smart Microbial Cell Technology, from Los Alamos National Laboratory, is an ultra‐high‐throughput biocatalyst screening platform…

A-LabInsider’s new application lists all the academic life science labs in Europe, filtering through them to make it easier for small and medium biotech companies to discover compatible labs to do business with. The concept was to create a central place for biotech SMEs to find academic labs through the content of available websites and…

By Aliyah Kovner Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have achieved unprecedented success in modifying a microbe to efficiently produce a compound of interest using a computational model and CRISPR-based gene editing. Their approach could dramatically speed up the research and development phase for new biomanufacturing processes and get cutting-edge bio-based products such…

PLA (Polylactic acid) is one of the few biopolymers available in large quantities and at a commodity price; however, its brittleness significantly limits its use in many applications. Strategies to improve its ductility are available, however, they compromise the strength and modulus of PLA and are costly. In contrast, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s low cost,…

A partnership between Sandia National Laboratories and the Boston firm BioBright to improve the security of synthetic biology equipment has become more relevant after the United States and others issued warnings that hackers were using the COVID-19 pandemic to increase their activities. “In the past decade, genomics and synthetic biology have grown from principally academic…

By Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office MIT engineers have designed a Velcro-like food sensor, made from an array of silk microneedles, that pierces through plastic packaging to sample food for signs of spoilage and bacterial contamination. The sensor’s microneedles are molded from a solution of edible proteins found in silk cocoons and are designed…

By Kimberly A Askey Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Ohio State University discovered a new microbial pathway that produces ethylene, providing a potential avenue for biomanufacturing a common component of plastics, adhesives, coolants and other everyday products. The discovery, published in Science, sheds light on a long-standing mystery about…

By Chris Adam Purdue University innovators are working on inventions to use micro-chip technology in implantable devices and other wearable products such as smart watches to improve biomedical devices, including those used to monitor people with glaucoma and heart disease. The Purdue team developed a fully implantable radio-frequency transmitter chip for wireless sensor nodes and…

By Eric Stann One day, people could monitor their own health conditions by simply picking up a pencil and drawing a bioelectronic device on their skin. In a new study, University of Missouri engineers demonstrated that the simple combination of pencils and paper could be used to create devices that might be used to monitor…

The discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is made by a jellyfish, transformed cell biology. It allowed scientists to stitch the GFP sequence to proteins from other organisms to trace their movements and interactions in living cells. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have designed peptide nanoparticles that can each glow…

On June 23, Lonza will host a free 60-minute webinar on how to gain control of bioprocesses through automated, aseptic sampling of bioreactors. Dr. Clint Pepper, director, MAST Products, will present three case studies demonstrating cost savings and enhanced throughput and Product Quality Attribute (PQA) optimization using the MAST Aseptic Sampling System, while maintaining bioreactor…

By Maxwell Geiger, Associate Product Solutions Manager for the BioProcess Analytics group within IDEX Health & Science Recently, regulators have encouraged pharma and biopharma companies to incorporate the concepts of Quality by Design (QbD) and Process Analytical Technology (PAT) into drug development and manufacturing processes (1). This encouragement is part of a drive for scientists…

Since Robert Hooke’s first description of a cell in Micrographia 350 years ago, microscopy has played an important role in understanding the rules of life. However, the smallest resolvable feature, the resolution, is restricted by the wave nature of light. This century-old barrier has restricted understanding of cellular functions, interactions and dynamics, particularly at the…

By Holly Ober Engineers at UC Riverside’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering have received a $600,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice to develop a test kit that can rapidly identify body fluids at crime scenes. Existing tests to detect body fluids are not very sensitive and consume relatively large amounts of…

Qosina carries a broad selection of in-stock, single-use bioprocessing components. The company provides 3D CAD models and comprehensive technical specifications, such as material safety data sheets, technical data sheets, material certification and compatibility information on most of these products. Qosina is ISO 13485, ISO 9001, ISO 22301 and ISO 14001 certified, reflecting its unwavering commitment…

[Republished from our sister publication, Design World] By Lee Teschler, Executive Editor It looks as though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may end up strongly suggesting that Americans cover their faces in public until the coronavirus pandemic plays out. The Washington Post reports the recommendations now being floated would call for…

Scientists have designed a catalyst composed of very low concentrations of platinum (single atoms and clusters smaller than billionths of a meter) on the surface of titanium dioxide. They demonstrated how this catalyst significantly enhances the rate of breaking a particular carbon-oxygen bond for the conversion of a plant derivative (furfuryl alcohol) into a potential…

Researchers at California Polytechnic State University have developed a low-cost approach that improves cell-free biotechnology’s utility for bio-manufacturing and portability for field applications. Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) is a biotechnology that harnesses active cellular machinery in a test tube without the presence of living cells, allowing researchers to directly access and manipulate biochemical processes. Scientists…

In 2016, the Containerized Bio-Containment System (CBCS), developed by Kansas City-based MRIGlobal — with support from HHI Corp., GPA Services L.L.C., the U.S. State Department, and The Paul G. Allen Ebola Program — was named one of the R&D 100 winners. The system is a first-of-its-kind, flyable medical transport unit and features full biocontainment. It…

Who ever said bioengineers can’t get their groove on? The Rice University team led by Antonios Mikos says otherwise with its development of a groovy method to seed sophisticated, 3D-printed tissue-engineering scaffolds with living cells to help heal injuries. The researchers are literally carving grooves into plastic threads used to build the scaffolds. The grooves…

Predicting the future is hard – predicting the future of technology is even harder. In the last 10 years, everything from entertainment to travel has been upended by the likes of Airbnb, Spotify, and Instagram – none of which even existed a decade ago – while Netflix was still delivering DVDs by mail. Now, as…

Researchers at Purdue University have been working to develop new technologies to help stop the spread of foodborne illnesses, which kill 3,000 people a year, by detecting them more efficiently. They have developed a lanthanide-based assay coupled with a laser that can be used to detect toxins and pathogenic E. coli in food samples, water…