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

Researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas; and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China have discovered that certain nanotechnology-based cancer therapies may be less effective in younger patients, highlighting the need for further investigation into the impact of aging on the body's ability to respond to treatment. The researchers found age-related differences are due to how effectively the liver filters the bloodstream. Younger livers are more efficient at this process, which helps limit toxins in the blood but also filters out beneficial treatments, potentially rendering them ineffective.

Some 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome, glass vessels carrying wine or water, or perhaps an exotic perfume, tumbled from a table in a marketplace, and shattered to pieces on the street. Now, these tiny pieces of glass have been uncovered by scientists at Tufts University; Carl Zeiss Microscopy LLC. (White Plains, NY0; and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Venezia-Mestre in Italy and revealed themselves to be something extraordinary. On their surface is a mosaic of iridescent colors of blue, green and orange, with some displaying shimmering gold-colored mirrors. What the researchers were looking at was nanofabrication of photonic crystals by nature. "It's really remarkable that you have glass that is sitting in the mud for two millennia, and you end up with something that is a textbook example of a nanophotonic component," said Fiorenzo Omenetto, one of the scientists involved in this study.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University are leading innovative research to more effectively trap nanosized extracellular vesicles and particles, which can then be analyzed for their roles in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. The researchers used an anapole antenna to condense the electromagnetic energy to the nanoscale and to successfully trap extracellular vesicles and particles using relatively low laser power.

A consortium of U.S. battery scientists, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), will accelerate the commercialization of a new family of battery cathode materials called DRX or “disordered rock salt.” DRX cathodes could provide batteries with higher energy density than conventional lithium-ion battery cathodes made of nickel and cobalt, two metals that are in critically short supply. Researchers from Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and the University of California Santa Barbara will assist with materials characterization.

Researchers at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, a user facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Northrop Grumman, a multinational aerospace and defense technology company, have found a way to maintain valley polarization at room temperature using novel materials and techniques. The materials they used, called transition metal dichalcogenides, are layered materials that can be, at their thinnest, only a few atoms thick. Each layer in the material consists of a two-dimensional sheet of transition metal atoms sandwiched between chalcogen atoms. This discovery could lead to devices that store and process information without the need to keep them at ultra-low temperatures. 

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working on making RNA vaccines against COVID-19 even better. By tweaking the design of the vaccines, the researchers showed that they could generate COVID-19 RNA vaccines that produce a stronger immune response, at a lower dose, in mice. RNA vaccines consist of a strand of RNA that encodes a viral or bacterial protein, also called an antigen. In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, this RNA codes for a segment of the virus's spike protein. In this study, the MIT researchers engineered both the nanoparticles used to deliver the COVID-19 antigen and the antigen itself, to boost the immune response.

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.