Tag Archives: Lin Edwards

Mutant silkworms enter world of haute couture

Researchers in Japan have bioengineered silkworms which produce silk in fluorescent shades of red, orange, and green.

Wedding gown made from fluorescent silks, designed by Yumi Katsura, shown in white and UV light. (Iizuka et al., Advanced Functional Materials)

Wedding gown made from fluorescent silks, designed by Yumi Katsura, shown in white and UV light. (Iizuka et al., Advanced Functional Materials)

The dress gives you two looks for your wedding, one for the ceremony and one for the reception. Unfortunately, it’s not listed on Yumi Katsura’s website, so you may have to wait a while before you can purchase it.

You can read more about the mutant silkworms in a June 21, 2013 news item by Lin Edwards for phys.org,

Scientists in Japan have genetically engineered silkworms to create red, green or orange silks that glow under fluorescent lights.
… a research team led by Tetsuya Iizuka and Toshiki Tamura of the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Ibaraki, Japan, has genetically modified the silkworm by transplanting genes from organisms that produce fluorescent proteins into the silkworm genome at the site coding for the silk fiber protein fibroin. The genes they used to make the transgenic silkworms came from the Fungia concinna coral (orange), Discoma coral (red) or jellyfish (green).

There is also a June 20, 2013 story by Nadia Drake for Wired magazine which provides more information and images about the project in Japan (Note: Links have been removed),

Silkworms in a Japanese lab are busy spinning silks that glow in the dark. But these silkworms, unlike others that have been fed rainbow-colored dyes, don’t need any dietary interventions to spin in color: They’ve been genetically engineered to produce fluorescent skeins in shades of red, orange, and green.

Now, scientists have tweaked the silk production process and made it possible to turn these somewhat freakish threads into useable fabrics.

The resulting silks glow under fluorescent light, and are only ever-so-slightly weaker than silks that are normally used for fabrics, scientists reported June 12 in Advanced Functional Materials. Already, the glowing silks have been incorporated into everyday garments such as suits and ties, and Japanese wedding dress designer Yumi Katsura has designed and made gowns that glow in the dark.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the published research paper,

Colored Fluorescent Silk Made by Transgenic Silkworms by Tetsuya Iizuka, Hideki Sezutsu, Ken-ichiro Tatematsu, Isao Kobayashi, Naoyuki Yonemura, Keiro Uchino, Kenichi Nakajima, Katsura Kojima, Chiyuki Takabayashi, Hiroaki Machii, Katsushige Yamada2, Hiroyuki Kurihara, Tetsuo Asakura, Yasumoto Nakazawa, Atsushi Miyawaki, Satoshi Karasawa, Hatsumi Kobayashi, Junji Yamaguchi, Nobuo Kuwabara, Takashi Nakamura, Kei Yoshii, and Toshiki Tamura.
Article first published online: 12 JUN 2013 Adv. Funct. Mater.. doi: 10.1002/adfm.201300365

© 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

Cleaning dirty water

Two news items about cleaning dirty water and the Canadian nanotech scene in two days! First, I got news of a Canada-China-India-Israel Roundtable on Sustainable Water Management via Nano- and Emerging Technologies held February 22-23, 2011 in Edmonton, Alberta. [Note: The information about the participant countries is directly from the ISTP website and there is no mention of the US as there is in the following article. This may be due to a late entrance to the event.] From the Feb. 22, 2011 article by Dave Cooper in the Vancouver Sun,

Canada joined hands with four other nations Tuesday in a partnership aimed at harnessing the potential of nanotechnology to improving the world’s water supply.

“Applying advanced technology to the problems of water is a serious issue. This is not a sideshow, it is a fundamental issue,” said Henri Rothschild, CEO of federally backed International Science and Technology Partnerships (ISTP) Canada.

The goal of the participants from Canada, the U.S. [?], China, India and Israel is to discuss “the real opportunities to address these challenges by pooling resources and expertise,” he said, in a spectrum from drinking and waste water to desalinization.

… with plenty of local water research underway to deal with the oilsands, funded by industry and governments, the region is now internationally recognized for its water expertise. “There are a lot of scientists and engineers here who know the subject. It’s leading edge and dealing with some very hard issues,” Rothschild said. “With this roundtable, we are trying to break new ground and create something that takes it to another level, and have it based here in Canada. This is one model under discussion,” he added.

There’s more information about the event on the ISTP roundtable wepage and, for those who are curious about the ISTP itself, here’s a description from their Who We Are page,

STPCanada was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization with the primary objective of strengthening Canada’s science and technology (S&T), business to business relations and ultimately overall economic, trade and political relations. ISTPCanada was selected by the Government of Canada, through the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, to deliver the India, China and Brazil elements of its International Science and Technology Partnerships Program (ISTPP). Reflecting that bilateral S&T agreements are already in place with India and China, funding for these two countries was provided to ISTPCanada in April 2007, with additional funding for Brazil expected in 2008/2009 on completion of a similar bilateral agreement.

I do see the flag for the State of California on the page but it’s  not mentioned as a member of the ISTP. Perhaps they haven’t had time to update the site or they’re not sure how to add the information given that the other members are countries. Also, Brazil which is a member of the ISTP was not at the roundtable.

Getting back to the water, I had no idea the Edmonton region was internationally recognized for its expertise in water.  Meanwhile on the other side of the country, researchers from McGill University have developed a new and inexpensive way to filter water in case of emergencies. From the Feb. 23, 2011 news release,

Disasters such as floods, tsunamis, and earthquakes often result in the spread of diseases like gastroenteritis, giardiasis and even cholera because of an immediate shortage of clean drinking water. Now, chemistry researchers at McGill University have taken a key step towards making a cheap, portable, paper-based filter coated with silver nanoparticles to be used in these emergency settings.

“Silver has been used to clean water for a very long time. The Greeks and Romans kept their water in silver jugs,” says Prof. Derek Gray, from McGill’s Department of Chemistry. But though silver is used to get rid of bacteria in a variety of settings, from bandages to antibacterial socks, no one has used it systematically to clean water before. “It’s because it seems too simple,” affirms Gray.

Prof. Gray’s team, which included graduate student Theresa Dankovich, coated thick (0.5mm) hand-sized sheets of an absorbent porous paper with silver nanoparticles and then poured live bacteria through it. “Viewed in an electron microscope, the paper looks as though there are silver polka dots all over,” says Dankovich, “and the neat thing is that the silver nanoparticles stay on the paper even when the contaminated water goes through.” The results were definitive. Even when the paper contains a small quantity of silver (5.9 mg of silver per dry gram of paper), the filter is able to kill nearly all the bacteria and produce water that meets the standards set by the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The filter is not envisaged as a routine water purification system, but as a way of providing rapid small-scale assistance in emergency settings. “It works well in the lab,” says Gray, “now we need to improve it and test it in the field.”

This story reminds me of an Aug. 18, 2010  news article by Lin Edwards on physorg.com about ‘nano’ tea bags (excerpted from the article),

Scientists in South Africa have come up with a novel way of purifying water on a small scale using a sachet rather like a tea bag, but instead of imparting flavor to the water, the bag absorbs toxins, filters out and kills bacteria, and cleans the water.

The bag, which fits into the neck of an ordinary water bottle, was developed by scientists at Stellenbosch University in South Africa to help communities with no water purification facilities to clean their water. The bags are made of inexpensive tea bag material but instead of containing tea they contain nano-scale antimicrobial fibers that filter out contaminants and microbes, and granules of activated carbon that kill the bacteria. The nano-fibers are about one hundredth the width of a human hair.

According to researcher Marelize Botes, one sachet can clean a liter of the dirtiest water to about the same water quality of bottled water. Once the bag has been used it is discarded and a new bag is fitted in the neck of the bottle. The discarded bags have no environmental impact as they disintegrate in only a few days and the materials are not toxic to humans.

It’s hard to tell how closely related the research and initiatives are despite the fact that they’re all talking about ‘dirty water’. What I mean is that the water being discussed in the Dave Cooper article is industrial water recycled from sewage and waste, while the McGill researchers and the South African researchers are focused on drinking water that has been contaminated.

Latest on silver nanoparticle toxicity

Dr. Bernd Nowack has issued another report on nanosilver. His work was first mentioned in my Sept. 8, 2010 posting which focused on how washing silver nanoparticle-treated textiles releases silver nanoparticles into the wash water. Nowack’s latest work is a report recommending a more stringent approach to studying the risk that silver nanoparticles might pose to the environment. From the Nov. 22, 2010  news item by Lin Edwards on physrorg.com,

Dr. Nowack said one of the risks arises because some of the wastewater and sludge from sewage treatment plants ends up on farms in fertilizers, and could therefore enter the food chain. Another risk is that nanosilver could have a detrimental effect on the nitrifying bacteria that are vital to the effluent treatment processes, and could prevent treatment plants from working properly.

Nowack’s report said in earlier studies some nanosilver had been shown to bond with sulfur in sewage sludge to produce non-toxic silver sulfide nanoparticles, but it is not known how efficient sulfur is at removing biocidal silver.