Smart bricks will transform how buildings work

ORIGINAL: UWE Bristol

Smart bricks capable of recycling wastewater and generating electricity from sunlight are being developed by a team of scientists from the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). The bricks will be able to fit together and create 'bioreactor walls' which could then be incorporated in housing, public building and office spaces

The UWE Bristol team is working on the smart technologies that will be integrated into the bricks in this pan European 'Living Architecture' (LIAR) project led by Newcastle University. The LIAR project brings together living architecture, computing and engineering to find a new way to tackle global sustainability issues.

The smart living bricks will be made from bio-reactors filled with microbial cells and algae. Designed to self-adapt to changing environmental conditions the smart bricks will monitor and modify air in the building and recognise occupants.

Each brick will contain Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) containing a variety of micro-organisms specifically chosen to 

• clean water, 
• reclaim phosphate, 
• generate electricity and 
• facilitate the production of new detergents, 

as part of the same process.

The MFCs that will make up the living engine of the wall of smart bricks will be able to sense their surroundings and respond to them through a series of digitally coordinated mechanisms.

Professor Andrew Adamatzky, LIAR Project Director for UWE Bristol, is leading the UWE Bristol team, he said, “The technologies we are developing aim to transform the places where we live and work enabling us co-live with the building.

“A building made from bio-reactors will become a large-scale living organism that addresses all environmental and energy needs of the occupants. Walls in buildings comprised of smart bricks containing bioreactors will integrate massive-parallel computing processors where millions of living creatures sense the occupants in the building and the internal and external environmental conditions.

“Each smart brick is an electrical analogous computer. A building made of such bricks will be a massive-parallel computing processor.”

A photo-bioreactor is a device that can be programmed to utilize a variety of inputs such as 

• grey water, 
• microbial consortia (algae and bacteria), 
• carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and 
• different types of nutrient to generate outputs.

These outputs include

• 'polished' water, 
• fertiliser, 
• extractable products (recoverable phosphate), 
• oxygen, 
• next generation biodegradable detergents, 
• electricity, 
• recoverable biomass, 
• bio-fluorescence and to a certain extent, 
• heat.

Professor Ioannis Ieropoulos, Director of the Bristol Bioenergy Centre (BBiC), at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at UWE Bristol, said, “Microbial Fuel Cells are energy transducers that exploit the metabolic activity of the constituent microbes to break down organic waste and generate electricity. This is a novel application for MFC modules to be made into actuating building blocks as part of wall structures. This will allow us to explore the possibility of treating household waste, generating useful levels of electricity, and have 'active programmable' walls within our living environments.”

Rachel Armstrong, Professor of Experimental Architecture at Newcastle University, UK, who is co-ordinating the project, said, “The LIAR project is incredibly exciting – it is bringing together living architecture, computing and engineering to find a new way to tackle global issues, like sustainability.”

The €3.2m LIAR (Living Architecture) project is co-ordinated by Newcastle University working with experts from the universities of

• the West of England (UWE Bristol), 
• Newcastle U
• Trento and Florence, 
• the Spanish National Research Council; 
• LIQUIFER Systems Group (Austria) and 
• EXPLORA.

The LIAR project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 686585

Mitochondria trigger cell aging, study shows

Dr. Clara Correia-Melo and Dr. Joao Passos are in the lab. Credit: Newcastle University

An international team of scientists has for the first time shown that mitochondria, the batteries of the cells, are essential for ageing.

In a study, published today in the EMBO Journal and led by Dr João Passos at Newcastle University, they found that when mitochondria were eliminated from ageing cells they became much more similar to younger cells. This experiment was able for the first time to conclusively prove that mitochondria are major triggers of cell ageing.

This brings scientists a step closer to developing therapies to counteract the ageing of cells, by targeting mitochondria.

Defying ageing in the cell

As we grow old, cells in our bodies accumulate different types of damage and have increased inflammation, factors which are thought to contribute to the ageing process.

The team carried out a series of genetic experiments involving human cells grown in the laboratory and succeeded in eliminating the majority, if not all, the mitochondria from ageing cells. Cells can normally eliminate mitochondria which are faulty by a process called mitophagy. The scientists were able to "trick" the cells into inducing this process in a grand scale, until all the mitochondria within the cells were physically removed.

Dr. Joao Passos and Dr. Clara Correia-Melo in the lab. Credit: Newcastle University

To their surprise, they observed that the ageing cells, after losing their mitochondria, showed characteristics similar to younger cells, that is they became rejuvenated. The levels of inflammatory molecules, oxygen free radicals and expression of genes which are among the makers of cellular ageing dropped to the level that would be expected in younger cells.

New thinking on mitochondria

Dr João Passos of the Institute for Ageing said: "This is a very exciting and surprising discovery. We already had some clues that mitochondria played a role in the ageing of cells, but scientists around the world have struggled to understand exactly how and to what extent these were involved.

"These new findings highlight that mitochondria are actually essential to the ageing of cells."

The team led by Newcastle University and involving other universities in the UK and the US, also deciphered a new mechanism by which mitochondria contribute to ageing. They identified that as cells grow old, mitochondrial biogenesis, the complex process by which mitochondria replicate themselves, is a major driver of cellular ageing.

"This is the first time that a study demonstrates that mitochondria are necessary for cellular ageing," said Dr Clara Correia-Melo of the Newcastle University Institute for Ageing and the lead author of the study. "Now we are a step closer to devising therapies which target mitochondria to counteract the ageing of cells."

Explore further: Stem cells overcome damage in other cells by exporting mitochondria

More information: Mitochondria are required for pro-ageing features of the senescent phenotype. EMBO Journal. DOI: 10.15252/embj.201592862

Journal reference: EMBO Journal

Provided by: Newcastle University

ORIGINAL: MedicalXpress

February 4, 2016

Carbon Capture: $9 million for pilot plant to trial new carbon capture technology Carbon capture

A new method for permanently and safely storing carbon emissions generated from fossil fuels and other industrial processes will be trialled in a mineral carbonation research pilot plant to be built at the University of Newcastle.


The ultimate goal is to transform the captured CO2 emissions into carbonate rock 'bricks' for use in the construction industry, therefore both dealing with carbon storage needs and introducing new green building materials.

Funding totalling $9m has been secured from the Australian and NSW governments and Orica. The project will be managed by Mineral Carbonation International, a partnership between the University's commercial arm Newcastle Innovation, the GreenMag Group and Orica.

A multidisciplinary research team, including Professors Bodgan Dlugogorski and Eric Kennedy from the University's Priority Research Centre for Energy and Orica Senior Research Associate Dr Geoff Brent, have demonstrated the technology in small scale laboratory settings and led the funding bids.

Professor Dlugogorski said the research pilot plant would allow for larger scale testing and determine cost savings and emission reductions compared to other methods of storing CO2.

"The key difference between geosequestration and ocean storage and our mineral carbonation model is we permanently transform CO2 into a usable product, not simply store it underground," Professor Dlugogorski said.

The mineral carbonation technology replicates the Earth's carbon sink mechanism by combining CO2 with low grade minerals such as magnesium and calcium silicate rock to make inert carbonates. The process transforms the CO2 into a solid product that can be used in many ways, including as new green building materials.

"The Earth's natural mineral carbonation system is very slow," Professor Kennedy said. "Our challenge is to speed up that process to prevent CO2 emissions accumulating in the air in a cost-effective way."

The research pilot plant is the result of six years of R&D undertaken by a team including experts from the University of Newcastle, the GreenMag Group and Orica.

It will be built at the University's Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources (NIER) and is expected to be operational by 2017.

Contact: Sheena Martin
Contact Phone: +61 2 4921 8714
Contact Email: media@newcastle.edu.au


ORIGINAL: Newcastle U
23 August 2013

Floppy Cells

ORIGINAL: The Scientist
By Kate Yandell

July 24, 2013

Cell division in L-forms—bacterial variants that have no cell walls—could shed light on how primitive life forms replicated.

PINCH HITTING: When a walled Bacillus subtilis cell divides, complicated cellular machinery segregates its contents and builds a new peptidoglycan wall across its center (1) before the bacterium splits into two daughter cells (2). L-form bacteria, which don’t have cell walls, dispense with the normal replication methods, at least in some cases. Instead, L-forms produce extra cell membrane and extra chromosomes and become large and irregularly shaped (3). Biomechanical forces cause smaller cells to break off through blebbing (4) or tubulation (5).
LUCY READING-IKKANDA

The paper
R. Mercier et al., “Excess membrane synthesis drives a primitive mode of cell proliferation,” Cell, 152:997-1007, 2013.

Bacterial cells usually divide in an orderly fashion, building new cell walls across their centers before they separate. But recent research suggests that cell division for bacterial L-forms, which lack a cell wall, is a haphazard affair—possibly more reminiscent of primitive cell replication than of modern-day bacterial reproduction.

Many bacterial species, ranging from the harmless soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis to the pathogenic Listeria monocytogenes, have L-forms. They are pared-down versions of ordinary cells of their species, containing nearly the same genes but lacking the exterior peptidoglycan coating that is a defining bacterial trait.

Jeff Errington, a cell and molecular biologist at Newcastle University in the U.K., initially turned to L-form bacteria several years ago as a simpler model for studying cell division in bacteria. In particular, he wanted to understand the role of cytoskeletal proteins in helping the cell membrane constrict during division. Instead, “what we realized is that they don’t use that machinery at all,” he said.

In a 2009 study, Errington and colleagues showed that they could create proliferating B. subtilis L-forms by turning off genes important for cell-wall synthesis and introducing a single mutation in a gene called IspA, a mutation that appeared to protect the cell from death in the absence of its wall (Nature, 457:849-54).

In a new study of the genes involved, the researchers depleted the bacterium’s cell wall enzymatically, without altering the genome—except for introducing the protective IspA mutation. Most cells failed to grow, but one cell reproduced both in the walled and L-form states, and the scientists sequenced its genome to fish for the gene mutations responsible for its survival. One mutation, located upstream of the genes AccA and AccD, which are involved in fatty-acid synthesis, caused cells to grow excess lipid membrane. As the ratio of membrane area to cell volume rose, the investigators hypothesized, biomechanical forces caused parts of the cell to shear off into progeny, taking with them copies of the complete genome that L-form cells have in reserve.

This uncomplicated reproduction process reminded Errington of the lipid vesicle experiments biologists perform to study the origins of life. L-forms’ division supports the idea that primitive cells could have divided without evolving the intricate processes most cells rely on today. “This may resemble the mechanisms that [were] there before a more stable cell wall,” said Martin Loessner, a microbiologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who also studies L-forms. But he adds that L-forms of various species may have different reproduction strategies—dividing symmetrically, forming vesicle “daughter cells” in their interiors and then releasing them, or even using limited cellular division machinery.

Errington is also interested in studying the role that these primitive forms could play in disease and antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics that attack the cell wall can cause bacteria to convert into L-forms, and Errington suspects this conversion could provide a temporary escape hatch for pathogens, allowing them to dodge drugs and the immune system. It’s a problem that’s “very interesting and potentially important” to medicine, he says.