Nanodot bio-organic nanochrystals will charge you phone in 30 seconds flat… in 2016

An Israeli technology company is working on a technology that could transform the semiconductor and energy-storage business. If you transform those industries, you transform modern life.

Store Dot, based in Ramat Gan, just to the west of Tel Aviv, is creating biological semiconductors that can, among other things, store a charge, emit visible light and be used to produce high-capacity, or quick-charging, batteries.

“If everything works, and we have a lot of evidence that it will do, we have a revolution in many devices—memory, batteries, the display, image sensors,” said Doron Myersdorf, chief executive of Store Dot.

The semiconductors are known as quantum dots and are made from naturally occurring organic compounds called peptides, short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. According to Gil Rosenman, chief scientist of Store Dot and holder of the Henry and Dinah Krongold Chair of Microelectronics at Tel Aviv University, when the company manipulates their chemistry, these peptides can be made to self-assemble into quantum dots—molecular-size materials that have remarkable properties.

“We take these peptides, manipulate them and manage the self-assembly process that usually takes place in nature,” said Mr. Myersdorf. “Only two molecules of peptide attach to each other, and they create a very little structure, two nanometers in size. It has very interesting properties—some are optical, some are related to charge, and others piezoelectric,” meaning they generate charge under mechanical strain.

To get some idea of the scale, the diameter of a human immunodeficiency virus is about 60 times as large.

According to Mr. Myersdorf, these peptide-based quantum dots are crystalline in nature. “That is important,” he said. “It means they are stable. They can also hold a charge. That means we can actually create a memory.”

Quantum dots are not new, but typically they have been made using inorganic materials such as cadmium selenide. a known carcinogen. Further, he said, because it is a physical manufacturing process, there tend to be large discrepancies in the size of dots produced. Using a natural, organic process creates dots that are cheaper and less environmentally damaging to produce, and the results have high levels of purity and are identical in size. “We let nature take its course.”

Inorganic quantum dots already are being used for displays, and previously it was thought that organic dots would only radiate in ultraviolet frequencies. However, by manipulating the chemistry of the dots, Mr. Rosenman has been able to get them to generate colored light. “No one knows these peptides can be caused to vibrate in the visible spectrum,” he said.

Although the technology has a wide range of applications, and Store Dot has protected intellectual property in many areas, it is, for now at least, concentrating on just two: displays and batteries.

In a demonstration, Mr. Rosenman shone a blue light (the backlight in an LCD TV is blue) onto tubes containing different solutions of quantum dots. The tubes lit up in red, green and blue—the constituents of any display. “There is a cost saving of about 10 times compared to other displays,” said Mr. Myersdorf. “The manufacturing process is the same as for making OLEDs.” An OLED is an organic light-emitting diode, commonly found in some smartphones and TVs.

But it isn’t just far-cheaper displays that Store Dot is working on. Mr. Rosenman demonstrated a power cell. By replacing the electrolyte with a solution containing the quantum dots, the same cell had a five-fold increase in charge.

Not only can much more powerful batteries be made (or batteries generating the same power at a greatly reduced size), but quantum-dot-enhanced power cells should not show the same degradation as conventional batteries.

“Because the quantum dots are crystalline, they stay for thousands of charge cycles,” Mr. Rosenman said.

The company is working on a cell for powering a cellphone that would take just seven minutes to charge for daily use.

At the moment the technology is still in the laboratory, but Store Dot is moving to trials and is in talks with cellphone maker Samsung Electronics Co. and others about commercializing the technology.

Precise mechanical manipulation of individual long DNA molecules

Electron micrographs demonstrating Aeon
Biowares' patented Molecular Threading technology.
Left: DNA molecules threaded onto an electron microscopy
grid with an amorphous carbon surface; right:
DNA molecules threaded onto a graphene
coated grid (credit: Aeon Biowares and KurzweilAI)

Teams of researchers from Harvard University and Halcyon Molecular, Inc. have disclosed “Molecular Threading,” the first technology to allow single DNA molecules to be drawn from solution and precisely manipulated, allowing for faster, cheaper, more accurate DNA sequencing.

This novel technology pulls single high-molecular weight DNA molecules from solution into air and then places them onto any surface. Halcyon Molecular developed the processes and the intellectual property is now owned by Palo Alto-based biotechnology firm Aeon Biowares.


“Molecular Threading offers a unique means of reaching from the macroscopic world into the world of large molecules with unprecedented exactitude,” says Dr. Chris Melville, CEO of Aeon Biowares and former Director of Chemistry at Halcyon Molecular. …

Additional details from the Aeon Biowares news release: “Molecular Threading, News of the First Public Disclosure“

Molecular Threading was invented by brothers Michael and William Andregg, the co-founders of Halcyon Molecular, Inc. Both co-authors on the current paper [open access: Molecular Threading: Mechanical Extraction, Stretching and Placement of DNA Molecules from a Liquid-Air Interface], the Andregg brothers were previously the subjects of a major profile in the national UK-based newspaper The Independent (“Silicon Valley: The anatomy of a cutting-edge start-up“, Sunday 14 August 2011).

The invention was spurred by the Andregg brothers’ quest for faster, cheaper, and more accurate DNA sequencing technologies. In particular, they needed a way to place DNA molecules onto surfaces in a more controlled manner than current techniques allow. As they tried many different techniques, including methods that are contrasted in the paper, they made an elegant discovery. A simple glass needle tip pulled from a Bunsen flame and coated with a hydrophobic polymer could stretch individual DNA molecules from water into air and place them onto a surface. Furthermore, due to the tension between the needle and the liquid, the DNA molecule is stretched in a geometrically predictable and reproducible way. The movie linked to here from the paper’s Supplementary Information shows how a bundle of DNA molecules remain normal to an air-water interface when stretched into air by the needle: DNA Thread Normal to Droplet Surface.

By attaching the needle to a piezo-positioner, they were soon able to make arrays of parallel stretched molecules as shown in the electron micrographs above. The image on the left shows DNA molecules threaded onto an electron microscopy grid with an amorphous carbon surface, while the image on the right shows DNA molecules threaded onto a graphene coated grid.

Molecular Threading is the enabling technology that allowed researchers for the first time to know the exact physical location of the DNA backbone. This together with the reproducible stretching meant that images that reveal the positions of the DNA bases could be used to determine the nucleotide sequence. This soon attracted the interest of Founders Fund partners Luke Nosek, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, whose investments allowed the team to exploit Molecular Threading for DNA sequencing by electron microscopy.

Further characterization of the invention was performed by a collaboration of researchers working at Harvard University in the lab of George Church and by several researchers at Halcyon Molecular, some of whom are now working at Aeon Biowares. This includes Halcyon founding team member Kent Kemmish, now founder and CTO at Aeon Biowares.

“This is the first time anyone has ever pulled single high-molecule weight DNA molecules—or any macromolecules for that matter—out of solution and positioned them in a controlled way,” says Kemmish. “Though still in pre-commercial development, it is arguably one of the most advanced nanotechnologies in existence today.”

This advance is a very important nanotechnology that is especially important for DNA sequencing, and thus for personalized medicine, a major component of future medical technology. Much genomic DNA is riddled with many copies of repeated sequences. Current sequencing methods can only read a few hundred nucleotides at a time, so that determining the unique sequences flanking each copy of a repeated sequence can be very difficult. Precise manipulation of long DNA molecules opens the way to reading much longer sequences than can be done with current technology. The disclosure publication speculates “Applications beyond sequencing include nanofabrication, such as aperiodic templates for organic or inorganic materials using DNA as an organizing scaffold, or precision-patterned DNA nanowire arrays.” Organizing complex arrays of catalytic properties could be a step toward building complex molecular machine systems, perhaps as a step toward atomically precise manufacturing.

—James Lewis, PhD

Source: http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=5805