Nottingham Scientists Find Way to Use Gold As Antiseptic Agent

A team of scientists at Nottingham Trent University has found a way of binding gold nanoparticles to antibiotics. The gold lessens bacteria resistance to the antibiotics by weakening the cell walls of the creatures.

The tests so far have been extremely positive and indicate that the particles are highly potent at neutralising bacteria such as E Coli.

The findings of the tests have been published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry and detail how the team has been able to control the production of nanoparticles as part of a chemical reaction. The tests have proven that the particles are highly robust and effective in both acidic and alkaline environments alike.

The gold within the nanaoparticles creates holes in the cell walls of the bacteria which reduces their resistance to antibiotics. The ability to coat particles with antibiotics could lead to exciting and innovative new ways of looking at how we fight bacteria over the coming years....

Boffo for the boffins. They and gold will save lives.

Gold Nanoparticles Add To Efficiency Of Bacteria-Produced Electricity

It;s not likely to be a significant source of demand, and it's only a lab project right now, but an electrical system using microbes to generate electricity has its efficiency improved about twenty times by putting gold nanocoating on the anode. That efficiency gain is compared to using naked graphite anodes. Since gold is expensive, the inventors are loking for a cheaper alternative like iron.

Planned uses for the gizmo are water treatment and even desalination in the midst of generating power.

Cancer Treatments Progressing With Nanogold

The frontier for smart tumour treatments using nanotechnology are for organs like the lungs that move when more conventional treatment methods are used (like surgery.) Markers, of which gold is often a component, aim to pinpoint the tumors and soften them up for radiation, heat or chemical therapy. A presentation at the 52nd meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine will explain how nanocoated gold bullets help improve radiation therapy.

Image-guided radiation therapy targets tumors in organs that tend to move during treatment, such as the prostate gland or the lungs, as well as tumors near vital organs. Often, inert markers are implanted into the body to help radiation oncologists pinpoint the cancerous tissue.

A group of researchers wants to draft these markers to deliver drugs that will combat cancer and make the tumor more sensitive to radiation. The drugs can be tailored to different tumor types, the researchers say.

"Right now, these markers are just passive implants that are inserted into the tumor," says Srinivas Sridhar, a physics professor at Northeastern University and director of the university's Electronic Materials Research Institute. "We're making them active and smart using nanotechnology," he said.

The challenge is designing a system that will work over an extended period of time and target the entire tumor without affecting healthy tissue. The team has already developed a nanoscale polymer coating containing anti-cancer drugs for gold fiducials, which are commonly used markers.

Now, the researchers report they can precisely tailor drug dosage and rate of release in laboratory tests lasting up to three months. The nanoporous morphology of the polymer coatings enabled the controlled release of molecules and nanoparticles. The results also help refine the team's models of drug release kinetics.

The group includes collaborators Mike Makrigiorgos and Robert Cormack from Brigham & Women's Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

For those who are interested, an abstract can be found here (.pdf file.)

Nanogilding

Two scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have managed to infuse toulene [benzene with a methane group in place of a hydrogen atom in the six-atom ring] with gold nanoparticles, and found that a droplet of the mixture leaves a single-atom sheet of gold on the surface once the toulene evaporates. That's as thin a gild as can be got. This method beats earlier ones, which took longer and left behind residue that had to be removed by dropping the air pressure to zero.

One of the surfaces was a three-inch silicon wafer, suggesting a use for the process.

Gold Refining Goes Digitally Enhanced

This item is an interesting convergence between gold and tech, which may be a portent of a more thoroughgoing wave of innovation in molecular chemistry. Andy Robinson has come up with a digitally-derived process to extract gold from waste materials and rock. On the innovation front, the trick is to use computers to digitally simulate molecular reactions and pick out ones that will get the job done more efficiently and with less waste. The Institute of Digital Innovation (IDI) at Teesside University is an organization geared to that kind of study.

“In many ways, the greatest innovation with this project is moving a heavy element of process design onto a computer screen and out of the laboratory where the greatest expenses occur.

“There is an additional benefit in that the resulting gold won’t have any toxic impurities associated with current extraction techniques – especially important for medical research,” he added....

He added: “With gold trading at record prices they are opening up old gold mines where there is a lot of waste material that most people would think is of little or no value. But if you can extract and purify the gold you can get very high-value material.

“To achieve this you would normally need a very expensive scientific lab. However, thanks to the IDI and university facilities, I have access to the software needed to digitally design how to map out scientific reactions at a molecular level and predict what will happen to the raw materials.”...

It seems quotidian, but the significance of it is huge. Chemistry traditionally worked by slogging through the books, calculating reactions out on paper, forming hypotheses based on that work, and testing them in the lab. Much like a spreadsheet worked before the first spreadsheet programs came along. I don't know enough chemistry to spell out what would be affected by this advance, but the pace of innovation is going to be speeded up considerably as computing power increases. Right now, it takes either a supercomputer or an Internet-connected network of a large number of PCs to get the job done. Given advances in computer power, though, it's foreseeable that one single computer will complete the task in (say) ten or fifteen years. Once the tech reaches that level, and the corresponding software is properly coded, there will be a lot of new reaction hypotheses generated a lot more quickly. It's almost a certainty that some of them will make current processes cheaper and/or less wasteful.

It's not nanotech, but it's a lot closer to feasibility than nanotech is.

Gold As Medicine

Exotic right now, this use may not be if the technique passes muster. According to PhysOrg.com, self-assembling gold particles have real potential to zap tumors with the aid of light.

A variety of studies by numerous investigators are demonstrating that gold nanoparticles have real promise as anticancer agents. When irradiated with light, gold nanoparticles become hot quickly, hot enough to generate explosive microbubbles that will kill nearby cancer cells, a physical process known as the photothermal effect.

A paper has shown that an artificially created gold nanoparticle compex, if attached to a molecule that seeks out tumour cells, can zap them without zapping cells that lack the target marker.


All I can say is, "wow."