Columbia Engineers Build Biologically Powered Chip
December 7, 2015 | Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied ScienceEstimated reading time: 3 minutes
While other groups have harvested energy from living systems, Shepard and his team are exploring how to do this at the molecular level, isolating just the desired function and interfacing this with electronics. "We don't need the whole cell," he explains. "We just grab the component of the cell that's doing what we want. For this project, we isolated the ATPases because they were the proteins that allowed us to extract energy from ATP."
The ability to build a system that combines the power of solid-state electronics with the capabilities of biological components has great promise. "You need a bomb-sniffing dog now, but if you can take just the part of the dog that is useful -- the molecules that are doing the sensing -- we wouldn't need the whole animal," says Shepard.
"With appropriate scaling, this technology could provide a power source for implanted systems in ATP-rich environments such as inside living cells," added Roseman.
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