With over 800 papers published in the first week of the new year, and a full month’s worth of conferences featuring graphene to be held everywhere from Surrey to Dubai, 2016 promises to be an exciting year for graphene.
The latest success for this wonder material is its role in delivering the very first pictures of a single protein. Not only fundamentally impressive, these pictures will be crucial in treating diseases in which proteins malfunction, such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease. To image a single protein, there were three requirements to be met: individual proteins needed to be isolated, a single protein needed to be kept fixed long enough for a scattering experiment, and it had to be ensured that radiation damage did not decompose the protein during observation. Jean-Nicolas Longchamp of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues achieved all of this with the aid of graphene. A solution of proteins was sprayed onto ultraclean freestanding graphene, and then placed under an electron holographic microscope. This type of instrument uses low-energy electrons, and so the protein was not damaged. The graphene is thin enough for these electrons to pass through and reach the microscope’s detector, allowing these images of individual folded proteins and protein complexes to be obtained for the first time. “There are some diseases which are related to the wrong structure of certain proteins,” said Longchamp in New Scientist this week. “In the future, we could image the difference in the structure of a healthy person and a person who has a disease.”
Another new use for graphene is as a “super sieve”: a subatomic filter to separate different atomic isotopes of hydrogen. Research published by a group from Manchester University has drawn media attention for the potential to clean up nuclear waste, and create the costly “heavy water” used in the nuclear industry.
The ability of graphene to sieve particles smaller than an atom is described by Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo, the first author of the study, as “not only new but unexpected”. This is the first time graphene has been shown to act as a subatomic filter.
The Manchester researchers, led by Nobel laureate Andre Geim, showed that graphene can act as a filter by slowing down the movement of deuterium through a membrane made of graphene and boron nitride. Ordinary hydrogen atoms passed straight through the sieve, while deuterium was effectively blocked. Discussing the work in The Independent, Lozada-Hidalgo said, “Acquiring the ability to separate particles smaller than an atom using a membrane at room temperature was unthinkable to me not long ago. I could imagine applications in biology, nuclear science, chemistry or physics.”
On the other side of the world, researchers from Tohoku University’s Advanced Institute of Materials Research (AIMR) successfully chemically interconnected chiral-edge graphene nanoribbons (GNRs). These GNRs were interconnected exclusively end-to-end, forming elbow structures identified as interconnection points. This configuration allowed the AIMR team to show that the electronic architecture at the interconnection points is the same as that along single GNRs. This is evidence that GNR electronic properties are directly extended through the elbow structures when interconnected. Before now, the connection aspect of graphene structures, crucial towards the realization of future high-performance electronics, had not been explored. Patrick Han, the project leader, says of the work “These results show that finding a way to connect defect-free GNRs to desired electrodes may be the key strategy toward achieving high-performance, low-power-consumption electronics.”
These are just a few of the exciting developments around the world made possible through graphene. With results published every week that surprise even the researchers behind them, it looks like 2016 will bring many more!
Closer to home, 2016 will also be an exciting year for Graphitene.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.08958
http://www.tohoku.ac.jp/en/news/research/graphene_nanoribbons_foresee_high_speed_electronics.html
