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

Vanderbilt University researchers have developed a way to more quickly and precisely trap nanoscale objects – such as potentially cancerous extracellular vesicles – using cutting-edge plasmonic nanotweezers. A breakthrough concept in nanoscience, called plasmonics, is being used to confine light to the nanoscale, but trapping nanoscale objects near plasmonic structures can be a lengthy process, because of the wait for nanoparticles to randomly approach the structures. In this case, the researchers used a high-throughput plasmonic nanotweezer technology, which enables the rapid trapping and positioning of single nanoscale biological objects in a matter of seconds. 

Scientists at the University of Chicago have demonstrated a way to create infrared light using colloidal quantum dots. Colloidal quantum dots are tiny crystals – you could fit a billion into the period at the end of this sentence – that emit different colors of light, depending on how big you make them. They are very efficient and are already being used in quantum-dot televisions, but in that case, they are used to make visible light.

Small metal nanoparticles anchored on a thermally stable oxide, like silica, are a major class of catalysts, which are substances used to accelerate chemical reactions without being consumed themselves. The catalytic reaction usually occurs on the reactive metal nanoparticles, but on some catalysts, hydrogen atom-like equivalents spill from the metal nanoparticles to the oxide. These hydrogen-on-oxide species are called "hydrogen spillover." Now, researchers from Penn State, the University of Houston, and Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, have discovered how and why hydrogen spillover occurs and have provided the first quantitative measurement of the process. 

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Ulster University in Belfast, UK, have reviewed leading work in subsurface nanometrology, the science of internal measurement at the nanoscale level, and have suggested that quantum sensing could become the foundation for the field's next era of discoveries. Potential applications could range from mapping intracellular structures for targeted drug delivery to characterizing quantum materials and nanostructures for the advancement of quantum computing.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Cyta Therapeutics, Inc. (Lowell, MA) have used a nanogel-based carrier to deliver a drug exclusively to the liver of obese mice, effectively reversing their diet-induced disease. The researchers gave the drug – which mimics a synthetic thyroid hormone – daily to obese mice. The drug was packaged inside the nanogel and delivered to the mice through their abdominal cavities. After five weeks of treatment, the mice returned to a normal weight, their cholesterol levels dropped, and their liver inflammation was resolved.

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and 4D Maker LLC in Okemos, MI, are developing a "smart packaging" system to monitor temperature fluctuations, moisture changes, and pathogens in perishable food products during transportation. A central feature of the system is a small, self-powered monitoring device consisting of flexible sensors and triboelectric nanogenerators, which convert mechanical energy into electricity.

A team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has devised a pathway for the mass manufacture of sensors that can simultaneously detect lead, mercury, and E. coli bacteria in flowing tap water. At the core of these sensors lies a one-nanometer-thick layer of carbon and oxygen atoms, which is coated on a silicon substrate. 

Using cutting-edge tools, scientists from the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, a user facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Warsaw have created a new layered structure with two-dimensional (2D) materials that exhibits a unique transfer of energy and charge. The team was able to get a more detailed picture of how long-distance energy transfer works in transition metal dichalcogenides – a class of materials structured like sandwiches with atomically thin layers.

Researchers from Northwestern University, the Houston Methodist Research Institute, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, New York University Langone School of Medicine, and the University of Texas at Austin have developed a novel single-cell nanopore genetic sequencing tool that accelerates sequencing analysis of same-cell genotypes and phenotypes in tumors. Single-cell nanopore RNA sequencing is a new type of genetic sequencing technique that can directly measure the full length of RNAs (instead of short strands of RNAs, which are commonly sequenced by current techniques).

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Lille in France have identified a novel pathway to stabilize nanoscale precipitates in alloys. "In the last two decades, researchers have realized that having nanoscale inclusions in the structure can actually be very beneficial to the material," said Pascal Bellon, one of the scientists involved in this study. "The challenge is that spontaneously, these small particles want to grow bigger." The researchers found that when irradiated, the nanoscale precipitates would form, as expected, but instead of continuing to grow, they would reach a certain size and stop.