Tag Archives: Robert Perkins

Eye implants inspired by glasswing butterflies

Glasswinged butterfly. Greta oto. Credit: David Tiller/CC BY-SA 3.0

My jaw dropped on seeing this image and I still have trouble believing it’s real. (You can find more image of glasswinged butterflies here in an Cot. 25, 2014 posting on thearkinspace. com and there’s a video further down in the post.)

As for the research, an April 30, 2018 news item on phys.org announces work that could improve eye implants,

Inspired by tiny nanostructures on transparent butterfly wings, engineers at Caltech have developed a synthetic analogue for eye implants that makes them more effective and longer-lasting. A paper about the research was published in Nature Nanotechnology.

An April 30, 2018 California Institute of Technology (CalTech) news release (also on EurekAlert) by Robert Perkins, which originated the news item, goes into more detail,

Sections of the wings of a longtail glasswing butterfly are almost perfectly transparent. Three years ago, Caltech postdoctoral researcher Radwanul Hasan Siddique–at the time working on a dissertation involving a glasswing species at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany–discovered the reason why: the see-through sections of the wings are coated in tiny pillars, each about 100 nanometers in diameter and spaced about 150 nanometers apart. The size of these pillars–50 to 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair–gives them unusual optical properties. The pillars redirect the light that strikes the wings so that the rays pass through regardless of the original angle at which they hit the wings. As a result, there is almost no reflection of the light from the wing’s surface.

In effect, the pillars make the wings clearer than if they were made of just plain glass.

That redirection property, known as angle-independent antireflection, attracted the attention of Caltech’s Hyuck Choo. For the last few years Choo has been developing an eye implant that would improve the monitoring of intra-eye pressure in glaucoma patients. Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide. Though the exact mechanism by which the disease damages eyesight is still under study, the leading theory suggests that sudden spikes in the pressure inside the eye damages the optic nerve. Medication can reduce the increased eye pressure and prevent damage, but ideally it must be taken at the first signs of a spike in eye pressure.

“Right now, eye pressure is typically measured just a couple times a year in a doctor’s office. Glaucoma patients need a way to measure their eye pressure easily and regularly,” says Choo, assistant professor of electrical engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science and a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator.

Choo has developed an eye implant shaped like a tiny drum, the width of a few strands of hair. When inserted into an eye, its surface flexes with increasing eye pressure, narrowing the depth of the cavity inside the drum. That depth can be measured by a handheld reader, giving a direct measurement of how much pressure the implant is under.

One weakness of the implant, however, has been that in order to get an accurate measurement, the optical reader has to be held almost perfectly perpendicular–at an angle of 90 degrees (plus or minus 5 degrees)–with respect to the surface of the implant. At other angles, the reader gives an incorrect measurement.

And that’s where glasswing butterflies come into the picture. Choo reasoned that the angle-independent optical property of the butterflies’ nanopillars could be used to ensure that light would always pass perpendicularly through the implant, making the implant angle-insensitive and providing an accurate reading regardless of how the reader is held.

He enlisted Siddique to work in his lab, and the two, working along with Caltech graduate student Vinayak Narasimhan, figured out a way to stud the eye implant with pillars approximately the same size and shape of those on the butterfly’s wings but made from silicon nitride, an inert compound often used in medical implants. Experimenting with various configurations of the size and placement of the pillars, the researchers were ultimately able to reduce the error in the eye implants’ readings threefold.

“The nanostructures unlock the potential of this implant, making it practical for glaucoma patients to test their own eye pressure every day,” Choo says.

The new surface also lends the implants a long-lasting, nontoxic anti-biofouling property.

In the body, cells tend to latch on to the surface of medical implants and, over time, gum them up. One way to avoid this phenomenon, called biofouling, is to coat medical implants with a chemical that discourages the cells from attaching. The problem is that such coatings eventually wear off.

The nanopillars created by Choo’s team, however, work in a different way. Unlike the butterfly’s nanopillars, the lab-made nanopillars are extremely hydrophilic, meaning that they attract water. Because of this, the implant, once in the eye, is soon encased in a coating of water. Cells slide off instead of gaining a foothold.

“Cells attach to an implant by binding with proteins that are adhered to the implant’s surface. The water, however, prevents those proteins from establishing a strong connection on this surface,” says Narasimhan. Early testing suggests that the nanopillar-equipped implant reduces biofouling tenfold compared to previous designs, thanks to this anti-biofouling property.

Being able to avoid biofouling is useful for any implant regardless of its location in the body. The team plans to explore what other medical implants could benefit from their new nanostructures, which can be inexpensively mass produced.

As if the still image wasn’t enough,

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

Multifunctional biophotonic nanostructures inspired by the longtail glasswing butterfly for medical devices by Vinayak Narasimhan, Radwanul Hasan Siddique, Jeong Oen Lee, Shailabh Kumar, Blaise Ndjamen, Juan Du, Natalie Hong, David Sretavan, & Hyuck Choo. Nature Nanotechnology (2018) doi:10.1038/s41565-018-0111-5 Published: 30 April 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

ETA May 25, 2018:  I’m obsessed. Here’s one more glasswing image,

Caption: The clear wings make this South-American butterfly hard to see in flight, a succesfull defense mechanism. Credit: Eddy Van 3000 from in Flanders fields – Belgiquistan – United Tribes ov Europe Date: 7 October 2007, 14:35 his file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. [downloaded from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E3000_-_the_wings-become-windows_butterfly._(by-sa).jpg]

Mass production of nanoparticles?

With all the years of nanotechnology and nanomaterials research it seems strange that mass production of nanoparticles is still very much in the early stages as a Feb. 24, 2016 news item on phys.org points out,

Nanoparticles – tiny particles 100,000 times smaller than the width of a strand of hair – can be found in everything from drug delivery formulations to pollution controls on cars to HD TV sets. With special properties derived from their tiny size and subsequently increased surface area, they’re critical to industry and scientific research.

They’re also expensive and tricky to make.

Now, researchers at USC [University of Southern California] have created a new way to manufacture nanoparticles that will transform the process from a painstaking, batch-by-batch drudgery into a large-scale, automated assembly line.

A Feb. 24, 2016 USC news release (also on EurekAlert) by Robert Perkins, which originated the news item, offers additional insight,

Consider, for example, gold nanoparticles. They have been shown to easily penetrate cell membranes without causing any damage — an unusual feat given that most penetrations of cell membranes by foreign objects can damage or kill the cell. Their ability to slip through the cell’s membrane makes gold nanoparticles ideal delivery devices for medications to healthy cells or fatal doses of radiation to cancer cells.

However, a single milligram of gold nanoparticles currently costs about $80 (depending on the size of the nanoparticles). That places the price of gold nanoparticles at $80,000 per gram while a gram of pure, raw gold goes for about $50.

“It’s not the gold that’s making it expensive,” Malmstadt [Noah Malmstadt of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering] said. “We can make them, but it’s not like we can cheaply make a 50-gallon drum full of them.”

A fluid situation

At this time, the process of manufacturing a nanoparticle typically involves a technician in a chemistry lab mixing up a batch of chemicals by hand in traditional lab flasks and beakers.

The new technique used by Brutchey [Richard Brutchey of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences] and Malmstadt instead relies on microfluidics — technology that manipulates tiny droplets of fluid in narrow channels.

“In order to go large scale, we have to go small,” Brutchey said.

Really small.

The team 3-D printed tubes about 250 micrometers in diameter, which they believe to be the smallest, fully enclosed 3-D printed tubes anywhere. For reference, your average-sized speck of dust is 50 micrometers wide.

They they built a parallel network of four of these tubes, side-by-side, and ran a combination of two nonmixing fluids (like oil and water) through them. As the two fluids fought to get out through the openings, they squeezed off tiny droplets. Each of these droplets acted as a micro-scale chemical reactor in which materials were mixed and nanoparticles were generated. Each microfluidic tube can create millions of identical droplets that perform the same reaction.

This sort of system has been envisioned in the past, but it hasn’t been able to be scaled up because the parallel structure meant that if one tube got jammed, it would cause a ripple effect of changing pressures along its neighbors, knocking out the entire system. Think of it like losing a single Christmas light in one of the old-style strands — lose one and you lose them all.

Brutchey and Malmstadt bypassed this problem by altering the geometry of the tubes themselves, shaping the junction between the tubes such that the particles come out a uniform size and the system is immune to pressure changes.

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

Flow invariant droplet formation for stable parallel microreactors by Carson T. Riche, Emily J. Roberts, Malancha Gupta, Richard L. Brutchey & Noah Malmstadt. Nature Communications 7, Article number: 10780 doi:10.1038/ncomms10780 Published 23 February 2016

This is an open access paper.

What is a buckybomb?

I gather buckybombs have something to do with cancer treatments. From a March 18, 2015 news item on ScienceDaily,

In 1996, a trio of scientists won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their discovery of Buckminsterfullerene — soccer-ball-shaped spheres of 60 joined carbon atoms that exhibit special physical properties.

Now, 20 years later, scientists have figured out how to turn them into Buckybombs.

These nanoscale explosives show potential for use in fighting cancer, with the hope that they could one day target and eliminate cancer at the cellular level — triggering tiny explosions that kill cancer cells with minimal impact on surrounding tissue.

“Future applications would probably use other types of carbon structures — such as carbon nanotubes, but we started with Bucky-balls because they’re very stable, and a lot is known about them,” said Oleg V. Prezhdo, professor of chemistry at the USC [University of Southern California] Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and corresponding author of a paper on the new explosives that was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry on February 24 [2015].

A March 19, 2015 USC news release by Robert Perkins, which despite its publication date originated the news item, describes current cancer treatments with carbon nanotubes and this new technique with fullerenes,

Carbon nanotubes, close relatives of Bucky-balls, are used already to treat cancer. They can be accumulated in cancer cells and heated up by a laser, which penetrates through surrounding tissues without affecting them and directly targets carbon nanotubes. Modifying carbon nanotubes the same way as the Buckybombs will make the cancer treatment more efficient — reducing the amount of treatment needed, Prezhdo said.

To build the miniature explosives, Prezhdo and his colleagues attached 12 nitrous oxide molecules to a single Bucky-ball and then heated it. Within picoseconds, the Bucky-ball disintegrated — increasing temperature by thousands of degrees in a controlled explosion.

The source of the explosion’s power is the breaking of powerful carbon bonds, which snap apart to bond with oxygen from the nitrous oxide, resulting in the creation of carbon dioxide, Prezhdo said.

I’m glad this technique would make treatment more effective but I do pause at the thought of having exploding buckyballs in my body or, for that matter, anyone else’s.

The research was highlighted earlier this month in a March 5, 2015 article by Lisa Zynga for phys.org,

The buckybomb combines the unique properties of two classes of materials: carbon structures and energetic nanomaterials. Carbon materials such as C60 can be chemically modified fairly easily to change their properties. Meanwhile, NO2 groups are known to contribute to detonation and combustion processes because they are a major source of oxygen. So, the scientists wondered what would happen if NO2 groups were attached to C60 molecules: would the whole thing explode? And how?

The simulations answered these questions by revealing the explosion in step-by-step detail. Starting with an intact buckybomb (technically called dodecanitrofullerene, or C60(NO2)12), the researchers raised the simulated temperature to 1000 K (700 °C). Within a picosecond (10-12 second), the NO2 groups begin to isomerize, rearranging their atoms and forming new groups with some of the carbon atoms from the C60. As a few more picoseconds pass, the C60 structure loses some of its electrons, which interferes with the bonds that hold it together, and, in a flash, the large molecule disintegrates into many tiny pieces of diatomic carbon (C2). What’s left is a mixture of gases including CO2, NO2, and N2, as well as C2.

I encourage you to read Zynga’s article in whole as she provides more scientific detail and she notes that this discovery could have applications for the military and for industry.

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

Buckybomb: Reactive Molecular Dynamics Simulation by Vitaly V. Chaban, Eudes Eterno Fileti, and Oleg V. Prezhdo. J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 2015, 6 (5), pp 913–917 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b00120 Publication Date (Web): February 24, 2015

Copyright © 2015 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.