The Friday Afternoon Breakthrough

Bryan Kaehr (l.) and Jason Townson.

“Fri­day after­noon is usu­ally the best time to do science. There’s some­how less pressure. The week is behind you. You may get to sleep in tomor­row morn­ing, so why not just try some­thing?” Bryon Kaehr said. Kaehr is a research sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico and an advanced mate­ri­als researcher at San­dia National Lab­o­ra­to­ries who is not long out of grad­u­ate school at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas-Austin. The results of this Fri­day after­noon exper­i­ment still make him smile.  “Wow, that’s cool! Where do I go from here?” he said.

He grew up in Albu­querque and was a lit­tle sur­prised when a research fel­low­ship brought him back to his home­town where he works out of the San­dia National Lab­o­ra­to­ries Advanced Mate­ri­als Lab­o­ra­tory on the UNM campus.

His sim­ple exper­i­ment may have far reach­ing impact for nano­ma­te­ri­als, for drug devel­op­ment, and for the whole field of bio-catalysis. Borrowing some cells from a Jason L. Town­son, a can­cer biol­o­gist from the Cen­ter for Micro-Engineered Mate­ri­als who was work­ing down the hall, Kaehr placed them in a chem­i­cal solu­tion of sil­i­con diox­ide (the basic ingre­di­ent of glass) which allowed the cells to absorb the mate­r­ial. Then he baked them at 600 degrees for three hours.

The bak­ing destroyed the bio­log­i­cal material. He was left with a per­fect inor­ganic replica of a cell. The struc­ture was com­pletely intact. When he sliced into the mate­r­ial, he could see the inte­rior com­po­nents as they were in the orig­i­nal cell. He had some­thing he had never seen or read about. A per­fect replica of a cell, but it wasn’t bio­log­i­cal any more. It was a build­ing mate­r­ial, some­thing a mate­ri­als sci­en­tist could actu­ally use.

Tech­ni­cal details about the research are avail­able in his research paper titled, “Cel­lu­lar com­plex­ity cap­tured in durable sil­ica bio­com­pos­ites,” which was just pub­lished in the Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sciences.

Kaehr worked with Town­son, Robin M. Kalinich from the San­dia National Lab­o­ra­to­ries’ Advanced Mate­ri­als Lab­o­ra­tory , Yas­mine H. Awad and Dar­ren R. Dun­phy from the Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal and Nuclear Engi­neer­ing at UNM, B.S. Swartzen­truben from the Cen­ter for Inte­grated Nan­totech­nolo­gies at UNM, and C. Jef­frey Brinker  to prove the Fri­day after­noon exper­i­ment was every­thing he ini­tially thought it was.

Cur­rently researchers who work with nano­ma­te­ri­als have lim­i­ta­tions.  They can build wires and they can build spheres.  They can’t make elab­o­rate struc­tures.  But cells can be made to grow in com­plex ways. Add a lit­tle salt to solu­tion in which a red blood cell is grow­ing and it begins to sprout some­thing that looks like fins. The com­bi­na­tion of cells and chem­istry present end­less possibilities.

Red blood cells chang­ing in salt solu­tion. Photo cour­tesy Bryan Kaehr.

Glass repli­cas of red blood cell exposed to salt solu­tion
There is some­thing else about this experiment. Despite the com­plete cov­er­age of the cell in sil­ica, the cell retains some enzyme func­tion. Enzymes are the work­horses of biology. They do the heavy lift­ing in com­plex chem­i­cal processes such as pho­to­syn­the­sis in plants. If this process can be used to sta­bi­lize enzymes in a pow­der form, so they can be stored on a shelf, and then put in a solu­tion and used when needed, the research group has found some­thing really valuable.

Not valu­able in terms of money.  The process is so sim­ple researchers with basic equip­ment can repli­cate it nearly any­time and any­where.  Valu­able in terms of allow­ing lots of sci­en­tists work with mate­ri­als in a way they never have before.

These mate­ri­als can be car­bonized, pro­vid­ing another inter­est­ing prop­erty.  They are elec­tri­cally con­duc­tive.  That adds an inter­est­ing dimen­sion to an exper­i­ment that is already inter­est­ing in other dif­fer­ent ways.

Kaehr thinks he can use the process to build com­plex nanos­truc­tures.  Other researchers may use the process to delve into bio-catalysis research because it sta­bi­lizes the enzymes so they might be used in harsh sol­vents or at high tem­per­a­tures.  The process may also offer a new way to man­u­fac­ture high value pharmaceuticals.

It was a com­bi­na­tion of the right time, the right lab, the right can­cer biol­o­gist down the hall and a Fri­day after­noon, that gave Kaehr the last word, “We did some inter­est­ing sci­ence. I can’t wait to see what hap­pens next.”

Media con­tact: Karen Went­worth (505) 277‑5627; kwent2@unm.edu