 This time on Partners, it's the Science of Small. From corn-based micro-scaffolds that promote smooth skin growth to minute protein sensors that expose harmful bacteria at the molecular level. From nanoscale mats that reveal unsafe material with a mere swipe of a cloth to mini-trackers that uncover pollution problems in our water supply. Researchers are exploring the power of the next frontier, nanotechnology. Welcome to Partners. In the next half hour, we'll travel the nation and see breakthrough work in research, education, and extension. That's what CSR EES is all about, helping universities generate valuable knowledge for those who need it and educating our next generation of Americans. And now, it's time for Partners. For millennia, we humans have viewed the world simply by what was readily seen. Easily observed. A waterfall. A forest. The sky above. But as scientific exploration expanded, so did other ways of perceiving our surroundings. Theories on atoms, molecules, and their subdivisions became established. And how we looked at and interfaced with our world changed forever. Today, the scrutiny has delved even deeper to that of the nanometer. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. To understand just how small that is, the length of a typical bacterium is 200 nanometers. The diameter of a strand of DNA, a mere two nanometers. Or consider this. If an average highway lane represents a string of nanometers, it would take more than half a million miles of road to equal just one yard. In other words, over 22 times around the globe. That's more than two times the distance from Earth to our Moon. By working at this tiny miniscule scale, researchers are learning how to manipulate matter like never before. In this brave new science of nanotechnology, the increased surface area upon which to work is exponential. And that opens up possibilities unimaginable until now. In the next half hour, we'll venture into this new frontier of nanotechnology. CSR EES-funded researchers are just beginning to understand its potential power for reshaping our future. And now, Partners Video Magazine presents The Science of Small. A nanofiber is about one-fifeth of a human hair. The fibers that we work with are around 100 nanometers in diameter. As we look at microscope images of these fibers, we almost never see any ends. We only see the size of the fibers, but they do seem to be very, very long. Some of the fabrics that you'll see could possibly be made of one single fiber, just moving back and forth and tangled to make that fabric. Margaret Frey has worked with traditional fabrics for much of her career. But in recent years, she has daringly entered into the science of small. Well, as the diameter of the fiber gets smaller and smaller, then a given weight of fiber has more and more surface. And we're trying to find ways to use that surface to do some pretty special things. It causes the fabrics to become more absorbent than an equivalent amount of a conventional fabric. And also it gives us a lot of surface area where we can capture and detect biohazards. I wanted to really look at what this could mean for fabrics and making fabrics that could do something special and something a little bit different than what we're accustomed to fabrics doing. With CSREES funding, Margaret and her Cornell team focused on biohazard detection. The first step was to make the fibers from a time-tested process known as electrospinning. We form a droplet of the polymer solution. We apply high voltage to that droplet, something on the order of 15,000 volts. A very fine jet of polymer will erupt from the surface of that droplet and is collected over on an electrical ground some distance away. The path that the fiber takes is very long. It whips back and forth in between that space. It cools down and the solvent evaporates and the fiber is stretched out to a thinner and thinner diameter. So using this technique we're able to make the nanofibers much smaller than anything you're able to make using mechanical forces. The next challenge was to find a way to bond a biohazard detector to the fiber. The team discovered that a vitamin B material called biotin fit the bill. We figured out that once we incorporated the biotin into the fibers we could use the fabric platform for biohazard sensing. I think of this whole system as kind of like a tinker toy. The researchers added a bonding protein, which easily combined with a biotin. This mix of materials proved successful in rapidly detecting E. coli bacteria in lab experiments. Detecting that E. coli for the first time was definitely a great day and we actually showed this does work. There's places where contamination is a critical issue that needs to be identified very rapidly. For example, transmission of infections in hospitals. So if you have a hospital room that's had a contagious patient in it perhaps the supervisor of the cleaning crew could go through behind them, sample all the surfaces and confirm that they're no longer able to detect anthrax or sepsis or pneumonia in that room and it's ready for the next patient to go into and not worry about contracting a new disease while they're in the hospital. Possibly quality control and food packaging where you're processing vegetables or really almost any kind of food and you could work out a system for sampling surfaces and then confirming that, oh, we've got some form of E. coli present or no we don't. Supercloth could also help identify germs in the home. For instance, salmonella from chicken or other food-borne bugs could easily be detected in the kitchen by a mere swipe of the cloth. Having a rapid yes-no response and the possibility that this could be done by just the general public and not someone with training in biochemistry is another goal for this project. The Cornell team wants to develop the fabric so that it would reveal a bright color upon identifying an unsafe bacterium. Right now it's a two-step process. One is collection, one is detection. But ideally we could move that to a one-step process that the color would develop on capture of the target material and we don't think that's going to be easy but we do think it's going to be possible. Detecting pathogens has definitely been possible but by incorporating this nanotechnology we've got something that's very small, very portable able to do a lot of work on a very small platform a very little piece of fabric to the end of a Q-tip, something like this. This interface between putting together the fiber science and the biological science has been one of the really exciting challenges in this project. CSREES has funded other food safety nanotechnology projects. At Clemson University researchers are developing sticky nanoparticles that reduce foodborne pathogens in poultry products. It was in 1948 that two university students developed the first barcode. In the last 60 years, this innovative identification system has infiltrated everyday life from retail stores to industrial documentation. But in the science of small, barcodes are taking on a totally new shape one undetectable by the human eye. DNA barcodes are very, very small. They are nanoscale. So a typical barcode, one molecule probably is around 50 nanometers or smaller and one nanometer is one billionth of a meter. These particles are so small that Dan Luo and his colleagues can only see them with sophisticated laboratory machines. Working at the molecular level, the team is building color-coded probes synthetic tree-shaped DNA capable of tagging pathogens in the human body. And these disease detectors go far beyond the world of medicine. There are many agricultural applications. For example, you can use that to potentially diagnose the infections in a farm and you can use nanobarcodes to trace the bacteria in a compost. It's very much like the barcodes you see in grocery stores. At the heart of this technology is Luo's ability to master the structure of DNA. By synthesizing three single strands, each complementary to one of the others along half its length, the researchers have created a Y-shaped DNA. It took us a whole year to get the sequence right for the Y-shaped DNA. The next step was to build a tree-shaped DNA that is nanoparticle friendly. Each different color here represents a Y-shaped DNA. The bonding of these elements is made possible by using an enzyme, a protein that accelerates chemical reactions. And that's the power of our nanobarcodes. We utilize the enzyme to do the connection. The enzyme has been evolved billions of years to do that work. So it's a very, very efficient process. That's the process that actually also happens inside our body or in any living organisms. So for nanobarcodes, we are going two different directions. One direction we want to enhance the sensitivity. In particular, can we do one molecule detection? That would be the ultimate sensitivity. The other direction is trying to make a portable detector so that we don't have to send a sample to the lab to make the detection. Rather, we can do the detection in the field, in a farm, or on the bedside of a hospital, or in a local environment. This is a prototype model of the portable detector that Luo soon expects to become a reality. Ultimately, it will interface with either a laptop or PDA. Then you can detect right in the battlefield, for example, or in the farm, what caused the infection. And then you can make a decision right there. You don't have to wait. It's giving us much more potential and many more opportunities to find new materials and new devices. We're trying to make materials that are DNA that are robust, efficient, low-cost, and ultimately can be used by people. CSR EES partners with 26 other federal agencies in the National Nanotechnology Initiative. Its goal? To support world-class research aimed at realizing the full potential of nanotechnology. ZN is a protein that you find in corn kernels. It is normally left behind after the corn is used for fermentation to produce ethanol or to extract starch. ZN has been known for a very long time. In fact, it was one of the first proteins that was thoroughly started back in the early 1900s. Graciella Padua is a nanotechnologist at the University of Illinois. Her fascination with the corn protein ZN goes far beyond its conventional uses. This yellow granular wonder has been used in making biodegradable plastic film for the food industries, for coatings to lock in flavors of nuts or raisins, and for pills in the pharmaceutical industry. But it is ZN's unique molecular structure that is key. ZN is a unique molecule. Being a storage protein, perhaps, it has a very tightly-knit package and structure, and we take advantage of that. Most proteins have shapes that are not amenable for manipulation. ZN is a material protein that will always respond in the same way. Research is friendly. In the science of small, Padua likens her activities with ZN structures at the nano level to that of building with Lego blocks. Working with spiked surfaces that allow her to build towers by combining matter at the molecular level. In nanotechnology, what we do is we have a substrate and with special equipment, we draw blueprints on a substrate. So once we have those blueprints, we can add the towers on top of them. We can draw a blueprint, say, of a structure and then let the protein stick to the specific points and therefore build up a structure out of the blueprint. Many different things can be made out of a protein. Scaffolds are one such thing that can be built of ZN at the nano level. These promise to provide smooth platforms for the growing of healthy new skin, a real boon to burn victims and others in post-operative situations. The first idea was to use it as a skin replacement, mostly because ZN tends to form layers. So since ZN is made out of layers, we thought, well, do we have possibility here it's possible to make layers out of ZN and therefore sell layers. There will be analogous to skin. We can make ZN stick to some surfaces and not stick to others and that's how we play with it. It is a protein that's biodegradable. It is compatible with cells. It doesn't hurt or damage or kill the cells. So they are comfortable around it. We take advantage of a process that's called self-assembly and that's because our protein has very distinct sides, if you wish. It is an Italy-packed brick-like molecule that has different sides and that allows it to connect with one another and build different structures. Another ZN structure under development at the University of Illinois is the nanotube. Padua foresees a medical scenario where this structure would carry a drug to a targeted infectious site within the human body with pinpoint accuracy. The benefit? Only miniscule amounts of medicine, like chemotherapy drugs, would be needed. Under the right conditions, ZN can roll up and form tubes or cylinders that can carry compounds inside. There are guiding molecules, if you wish, that will find their way to the target. The ones in the target will stick to the tissues and then the medicine will be emptied out and be delivered at the right place. We think that this can be used to transport drugs or other kinds of compounds into the body. But there are challenges working in the nano-world due to the very nature of everything being small. A speck of dust, when you're talking about nanoscale, it is a huge boulder or a mountain. So yeah, of course that will ruin anything. We use clean rooms to make sure that all the dust is out of our environment so we can look at the molecules. We're talking about instruments that have very high precision, few nanometers in them. The University of Illinois team uses the powerful atomic force microscope, a scanning probe that allows researchers to work in a three-dimensional nano-environment. The possibility to manipulate matter and molecules to form a specific outcome, the advent of very fine microscopes and technology that allows us to look at what we're doing gives us the real power of what can be done. By 2015, the global impact of products where nanotechnology plays a key role will be approximately $1 trillion annually and will require a highly-trend workforce of 2 million people. It's probably the major water quality issue in the country. And it's not only air culture, it's not only septic fields, it's things like radiation that's leaking out of the old military sites, things that kind of distributed broadly in the landscape. What researcher Todd Walter is talking about is non-point source pollution, those elusive, unseen places that are the source of contamination that threaten the purity of America's waters. What would be great is if we could find those sources, if we could take the non-point part out of the equation. Scientists have for a long time tried to trace pathways in the environment. What we really would like is some kind of a trace that we could put in the environment and we could have unique characteristics such that we could put one trace in one part of the landscape and another one in another part of the landscape and then when they get to the stream be able to tell them apart from one another. But we want them to move exactly the same way. In the science of small, Walter hopes to design nanoscale tracers, miniscule particles engineered to match the shapes of specific contaminants. If successful, the technology has the potential to eliminate the term non-point source from our vocabulary. Nanotechnology gives the ability to precisely control how these particles behave in the environment. It also gives us the ability to make those unique labels that allow us to tell one particle from another particle. It's really that it's that control that at very, very small scales that nanotechnology brings. So it's the surface property of the sand. Dan is really the designer of these nanoparticles. Researcher Dan Luo collaborated with Todd on the non-point source pollution problem. His nano barcode technology allows the scientists to track the particles through the environment. We want to overcome this no-point problem. So using barcodes, we can identify multiple points simultaneously from downstream. Because there are so many different places that can contribute to the pollution and in order to separate them and distinguish them, you need a tool such as a barcode to detect them. We use DNA-based coding inside of our microspheres. Todd's ball and yarn demonstration shows how the nano barcodes are integrated into the microspheres, detectors that seek out origins of pollution. One of the things that we've been able to do with nanotechnology is actually embed tiny little pieces of paramagnetic material, basically iron inside these little spheres or little tracers, and then we can use magnets to actually pull them out of there. The experimentation began on a small scale, testing tracer movements through just a few inches of sand in a glass tube. We did that because we wanted to be able to look at what was happening under a microscope as these tracers moved through sand and how they were interacting with the sand. What Dan had done is he put a little dye inside these tracers at florest so we could see them on a microscope image. We found that the particles seem to be moving through soil in a very similar way that microorganisms move through the soil. So we've gone from that scale to looking at small plots on parking lots, maybe 10 feet by 10 feet perhaps. Todd's goal in this outside experiment is to follow the flow. By simulating rain, he's testing how well the tracers travel across the parking lot. The samples retrieved at the sewer inlet are later checked to see how many particles made it across the pavement. These tracers might ultimately be a good proxy for the movement of microorganisms in water through a watershed. It gives us the ability to precisely control the geometry and the characteristics of very, very small particles. Ideally, we would love to have a chemical that dissolved in the water, but we're not at the point where we can make unique soluble chemicals yet. But we can still make things that are pretty small. And we're hoping to actually scale up to a full parking lot say two or three acres. Imagine a watershed where we know that there's sewage getting into the stream and we don't know where it's coming from. We could take these tracers and we could have one tracer A and dump it down one person's toilet. And we could take another tracer, tracer B, we could distinguish from A and put it down another one, and so on through the whole watershed. Then we just sample the stream until we see whose tracers are getting into the stream and then we know, okay, that's the septic field that needs to be fixed. We've already been approached by the town of Ithaca to do this for some watersheds where they have some leaky septic tanks. It's going to not only revolutionize very applied problems like fine inclusion sources. I think scientists will be able to ask new questions about how water and material moves through the landscape that they haven't been able to ask because we didn't have tools like this to use. On the next edition of Partners, it's Fluid Planet. The importance of water in the 21st century is paramount. The problems facing America range from water quality to water conservation. And as populations expand, the pressures on this life-giving resource increase exponentially. Land-grant universities are meeting the challenge of the fluid planet. Next time on Partners. 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