Current Nanoscience - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2006

Bio-nanohybrid materials constitute an emerging interdisciplinary field in the frontier between Life Sciences, Material Sciences and Nanotechnology. Since the last few years, special attention is being devoted to bio-nanohybrids due to their incidence in significant areas from regenerative medicine to new materials showing improved functional and structural properties. This issue of CNANO introduces some selected works Read More

An ideal 3D-scaffold for tissue regeneration should have similarity to native ECM in terms of both chemical composition and physical nanostructure. Recently, nanostructured biomaterials having physical nanofeatures such as nanocrystals, nanofibers nanosurfaces, nanocomposites, etc. gained much interest in regenerative medicine. This is mainly because of their resemblance of physical nanofeatures to natural extra cellular m Read More

The study of materials for bone tissue repair is one of the most important subjects in the field of materials research for biomedical applications. Bone can be considered as a biological hybrid material composed of an organic component, collagen, and an inorganic one, nanocrystalline carbonate hydroxyapatite (CHA). Both phases integrate each other into a nano-metrical scale in such a way that the crystallite size, nan Read More

Biocompatible nano-composite sol (NCS) comprising nano-crystalline hydroxyapatite (HAp, Ca 10(PO4)6(OH)2) and hyaluronic acid (HYA) was prepared. By varying the relative content of HAp in NCS, strongest network structure was obtained at 10wt% HAp in NCS, as confirmed from a number of circumstance evidences obtained by rheological, thermoanalytical, crystallographical measurements as well as FT-IR spectra. Read More

This review presents a comprehensive overview of the recent advances in the field of bio-inorganic nanohybrids. In the first part of this review, examples on hybridization of biomembrane mimics with inorganic backbone are described. Silane-bearing amphiphile was used for the preparation of Langmuir-Blodgett films that are mechanically stable and capable of permeation controls and electrode modification with vitamin fun Read More

The incorporation of bio-molecules and proteins into inorganic host materials has been given great attention recently. The present paper deals with the preparation, structures and properties of conjugates of mesoporous silica: folded sheet mesoporous materials (FSM), with chlorophyll (Mg-porphyrin) and heme (ferriprotoporphyrin). Horseradish peroxidase, light harvesting protein and myoglobin were also adsorbed in meso Read More

Bioencapsulation in silica gels has become a very popular field of research, leading to the design of biosensors and bioreactors. If pure silica gels appear suitable to maintain the biological activity of entrapped enzymes, there are many cases where hybrid materials are necessary to reach the long-term preservation of biomolecular or cellular species and/or to provide new functionalities. This review focuses on the design of suc Read More

An emerging group of hybrid materials is the so-called bio-nanocomposites, which are bio-hybrid nanostructured materials based on the combination of natural polymers (polysaccharides, proteins, enzymes, nucleic acids) and inorganic solids (clays, double layered hydroxides, phosphates, metal oxides, etc.). Bio-nanocomposites are interesting because, among other properties, the use of biopolymers provides Read More

We have developed techniques and methods based on porous membranes for applications in bionanotechnology. There are three general membrane-based strategies we have used to prepare our nanoscale systems. In the first method, namely, template synthesis, nanometer scale pores are used to synthesize and modify materials. We have shown that template synthesis is highly adept at producing biomaterials wit Read More

Nucleic acids are natural biopolymers that store the genetic information of organisms. This makes the detection and characterization of DNA and RNA a relevant task in biotechnology, with applications ranging from medicine to environmental control. During the last decades, a large effort has been focused on the development of biosensors, among them those devoted to the detection of nucleic acids in natural samples and th Read More

Layered double hydroxides (LDHs) with high anion exchange capacity have attracted particular attention in the fields of bio-hybrid nanomaterials due to their unique properties such as excellent biocompatibility, high affinity to carbonate anion, pH-dependent stability and high availability. To date, a variety of negatively charged biomolecules have been hybridized with LDHs to evolve into bio-LDH nanohybrids, including vitami Read More

Bioinorganic hybrid materials constitute a new generation of materials at the interface of biology and material science, able to display functionalities as complex as that of natural systems such as drug vectorization and delivery, molecular machinery functions or sensing properties. Among these bioinorganic structures, enzyme-clay nanohybrid compounds are under investigations for applications as biosensors or for Read More