Wyss InstituteBuilding Materials – Wyss Institute

Circe Bioscience licenses technology to decarbonize industry with microbes developed at Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Jessica Leff — Wed, 15 May 2024 10:55:37 +0000

By Lindsay Brownell (BOSTON) — The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced today that Circe, a startup developed at the Institute and spun out of Harvard, has signed a worldwide, exclusive licensing agreement coordinated by Harvard’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) to commercialize a novel bioproduction technology that could significantly…

Source

DNA Nanostructures for Drug Delivery

admin — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 05:58:48 +0000

Researchers at the Wyss Institute have developed two methods for building arbitrarily shaped nanostructures using DNA, with a focus on translating the technology towards nanofabrication and drug delivery applications. One proprietary nanofabrication technique, called “DNA-brick self-assembly,” uses short, synthetic strands of DNA that work like interlocking Lego® bricks. It capitalizes on the…

Source

Solving Sustainability with Synthetic Biology

Mariel Schoen — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 12:58:58 +0000

By Lindsay Brownell As humans, we like to think that we are the smartest animals on planet Earth. After all, no other species has invented smartphones, heat pumps, or jet engines. But for all our innovations, we have also created problems on a global scale. Take plastic, for example. Humans invented plastic scarcely more than a century ago, but we now produce more than 350 million…

Source

Staying dry for months underwater

Mariel Schoen — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:18:22 +0000

By Leah Burrows/SEAS Communications (CAMBRIDGE) — A species of spider lives its entire life underwater, despite having lungs that can only breathe atmospheric oxygen. How does it do it? This spider, known as the Argyroneta aquatica, has millions of rough, water-repellent hairs that trap air around its body, creating an oxygen reservoir and acting as a barrier between the spider’s lungs and the…

Source

Sustainable cooling technology heats up

Mariel Schoen — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 21:01:23 +0000

As average global temperatures continue to climb, the market for air conditioning is too: it’s estimated that worldwide demand for air conditioning will triple by 2050. If all those extra A/C units will use today’s standard, decades-old vapor compression technology, it could spell disaster for the planet. Not only does vapor compression consume massive amounts of electricity (increasing the…

Source

cSNAP: Eco-Friendly Air Conditioning

admin — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:03:55 +0000

As average global temperatures steadily climb, the worldwide demand for air conditioning is expected to triple by 2050. Conventional air conditioners, while cheap to manufacture, still rely on inefficient mechanical vapor compression methods developed almost a century ago to cool and dehumidify air, making them one of the largest consumers of energy in industrialized countries.

Source

Seed-dependent crisscross DNA-origami slats

Jessica Leff — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 20:30:26 +0000

This animation explains how the newly invented crisscross origami method can be used to build functionalized micron-scale DNA megastructures composed of many unique DNA origami “slats,” each with their own complexity and interactive properties. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University…

Source

DNA nanostructures grow up to become micron-scale megastructures

Jessica Leff — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 20:28:54 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — DNA nanostructures assembled from shorter DNA sequences as building blocks have long sparked the imagination of bioengineers because their precisely programable size, shape, and functions could open up a plethora of non-biological and biological possibilities. If they could be built to be sufficiently large and complex, we could harness them to create highly…

Source

cSNAP: Reimagining Cooling

Jessica Leff — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 14:35:34 +0000

We are reimagining air-conditioners to meet increasing global cooling demand while combatting climate change. Our novel evaporative cooling technology, cSNAP, uses advanced materials science and design to make affordable, environmentally-positive eco-friendly air conditioners that work in most climates without the use of synthetic refrigerants. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University…

Source

A major step forward for organ biofabrication

Jessica Leff — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:00:18 +0000

By Leah Burrows / SEAS Communications (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) ‑ Heart disease — the leading cause of death in the U.S. — is so deadly in part because the heart, unlike other organs, cannot repair itself after injury. That is why tissue engineering, ultimately including the wholesale fabrication of an entire human heart for transplant, is so important for the future of cardiac medicine.

Source