Viruses Build Piezoelectric Nanogenerator Through Self Assembly

Image: KAIST

Nanotechnology has opened up the possibility of building things like nature does: on the nanoscale. As such, biomimicry has been a guiding principle of nanomanufacturing.

But unlike natural processes, artificial synthesis of nanoscale structures has often required toxic and expensive conditions. Now researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) say they've developed a synthesis process that can be done in a more natural way without the costly and extreme environments previously required.

What the researchers came up with uses a harmless, man-made virus, known as the M13 viral gene. The researchers modified it so that it acted as a template for a piezoelectric material, barium titanate (BaTiO3).

The research, which was published in the journal ACS Nano (“Virus-Directed Design of a Flexible BaTiO3 Nanogenerator”), demonstrated that they could build a high-performance, flexible nanogenerator from the piezoelectric material using the M13 viral gene as template for guiding self-assembly of the device.

"This is the first time to introduce a bio-templated inorganic piezoelectric material to a self-powered energy harvesting system, which can be realized through eco-friendly and efficient material syntheses," said Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Material Science and Engineering at KAIST in a press release.

But, of course, using man-made viruses to guide the self-assembly of devices has long been the purview of Angela Belcher at MIT for over a decade. Nonetheless, we can’t quibble that this marks the first time that a virus template was used to create a nanogenerator. And it has a pretty respectable electrical output performance, claimed in the research paper to be about 300 nanoampere and 6 volts.

In fact, the real breakthrough of the research may be that the biosynthetic method that the KAIST researchers developed could open up new possibilities in bio-inspired self-assembly for applications ranging from thermoelectrics to biofuel cells.

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ORIGINAL: IEEE Spectrum

By Dexter Johnson
5 Dec 2013