It has been too long since I have blogged, and going to a meeting seems like a good reason to start up again. I spent the weekend in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 



The most interesting talk, by Angela Belcher at MIT, had on the surface very little to do with medicine. But it was so cool I have to blog about it.  Well, Belcher says she is applying her techniques to medical devices. And she does work on viruses—bacteriophage, to be more exact. 



Phage are viruses that infect bacteria, and it’s easy to make zillions in a test tube.  Belcher is using phage engineered to produce various proteins on their coats that nucleate the formation of inorganic materials—such as the building blocks of a solar cell, or lattices of cobalt oxide to create a battery electrode. 



She uses a technique often used by biologists, called ‘phage display’ in which phages within a large population each display unique peptides on their coats.  She can then screen for the phages that have the properties she is interested in, such as the ability to seed the formation of inorganic lattices of a particular confirmation. She further hones the properties of her phage—and the materials they seed—by natural selection.

She says she is inspired by the designs of nature—such as that of the abalone. Abalone shells are primarily calcium carbonate, a substance that by itself is soft and chalky. It’s proteins within the shell that prompt the calcium carbonate to assume a particularly tough and resilient conformation. 



Her goal is to generate materials that are ecologically friendly, replicable, and assemble at room temperature. She also wants her materials to be upscalable—something her lab could achieve, for instance, with successive dips of an electrode in a beaker of phage, and a beaker of inorganic material that assembles into place using the phage as a template.