News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

Researchers from the University of California, Davis, have developed a new technique to trap clusters of platinum atoms in nanoscale islands. Previous work had shown that platinum arranged in clusters of a few atoms on a surface makes a better hydrogenation catalyst than either single platinum atoms or larger nanoparticles of platinum. But such small clusters tend to clump easily into larger particles, losing efficiency. So, the researchers decided to "trap" platinum clusters on a tiny island of cerium oxide supported on a silica surface and noticed that such clusters showed good catalytic activity in hydrogenation of ethylene.

A few years ago, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University made an intriguing discovery: adding a branch to the end of lipid nanoparticles' normally linear lipid tails dramatically improved messenger RNA (mRNA) delivery. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have tested branched lipids in a variety of experiments and found that these lipids reliably outperform even the lipid nanoparticles used by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, the makers of the COVID-19 vaccines. The researchers hope the branched lipids will not only improve lipid nanoparticle delivery but also inspire a new approach to designing lipids, moving away from trial-and-error methods.

Researchers at Penn State have developed novel contrast agents that target two proteins implicated in osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease. By marking the proteins with the contrast agents, which comprise newly designed metal nanoprobes, the researchers can use advanced imaging, called photon-counting computed tomography, to simultaneously track separate biological processes in color, which, together, reveal more about the disease’s progression than a traditional scan. “This high-resolution … imaging approach could potentially be used to image multiple biological targets, thus enabling disease progression tracking over time,” said Dipanjan Pan, one of the scientists involved in this study. Read additional details about the research here: https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-technique-allows-technicolor-imaging-degenerative-joint-disease.

Scientists from the City University of New York, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Weill Cornell Medicine have developed a groundbreaking approach using nanoparticles that are primarily composed of a drug and a thin peptide coating which improves solubility, enhances stability in the body, and optimizes delivery to targeted areas. In leukemia models, the nanoparticles were more effective at shrinking tumors compared to the drug alone. “Using specially designed peptides, we can build nanomedicines that make existing drugs more effective and less toxic and even enable the development of drugs that might not be able to work without these nanoparticles,” said Daniel Heller, one of the scientists involved in this study.

Researchers from Vanderbilt University have developed advanced dialysis membranes using an atomically thin material called graphene. These innovative membranes leverage a protein-enabled sealing mechanism that works as follows: When proteins escape through larger pores, they react with molecules on the other side of the graphene membrane. This reaction triggers a sealing process, selectively closing larger pores while preserving smaller ones. This self-sealing capability ensures precise size-selective filtration and improves the membrane's overall effectiveness. The defect-sealed membranes remained stable for up to 35 days and consistently outperformed state-of-the-art commercial dialysis membranes. 

Researchers from the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) (a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology), KMLabs Inc. in Boulder, CO, and 3M Center in St. Paul, MN, have developed a novel microscope that makes examining ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors – which have a relatively large energy gap between the valence and conduction bands – possible on an unprecedented scale. The microscope uses high-energy deep ultraviolet laser light to create a nanoscale interference pattern on the material's surface, heating it in a controlled, periodic pattern. Observing how this pattern fades over time provides insights into the electronic, thermal, and mechanical properties at spatial resolutions as fine as 287 nanometers, well below the wavelength of visible light.

A new experimental vaccine developed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Caltech, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom could offer protection against emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2, as well as related coronaviruses, known as sarbecoviruses, that could spill over from animals to humans. Sarbecoviruses include SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and the virus that led to the outbreak of the original SARS in the early 2000s. By attaching up to eight different versions of sarbecovirus receptor-binding proteins to nanoparticles, the researchers created a vaccine that generates antibodies that recognize regions of receptor-binding proteins that tend to remain unchanged across all strains of the viruses.

Scientists from Montana State University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, North Carolina State University, the Honda Research Institute in San Jose, CA, and the National University of Singapore have enabled the emission of single photons of light in ultra small, two-dimensional, ribbon-shaped materials measuring one atom thick and tens of atoms wide – about a thousand times narrower than the width of a human hair. Although the ability to emit single photons was known to occur in large sheets of two-dimensional materials, the observation made in this study is the first demonstration that the ability to emit single photons also occurs in much smaller ribbon structures. 

Scientists from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Northwestern University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology have found evidence that silver nanoparticles embedded in packaging used as an antimicrobial agent were able to seep into the dry food the packaging is meant to protect. The scientists created samples of silver nanoparticles and embedded them in polyethylene film wraps, which could hold various types of food items. They tested wheat flour, slices of cheese, ground rice, and spinach leaves. They found that the nanoparticles had made their way to all the foods, though to varying degrees. They found, for example, that there was far more contamination of the cheese than there was of the spinach leaves.

University of Missouri scientists are unlocking the secrets of halide perovskites – a material that might bring us closer to energy-efficient optoelectronics. The scientists are studying the material at the nanoscale. At this level, the material is astonishingly efficient at converting sunlight into energy. To optimize the material for electronic applications, the scientists used a method called ice lithography, known for its ability to fabricate materials at the nanometer scale. This ultra-cool method allowed the team to create distinct properties for the material using an electron beam.