First Membrane Controlled By Light Developed 33
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: "A new membrane developed at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics blocks gas from flowing through it when one color of light is shined on its surface, and permits gas to flow through when another color of light is used. It is the first time that scientists have developed a membrane that can be controlled in this way by light."
understanding life (Score:4, Informative)
This is, IMHO, important to understanding, and perhaps tailoring, smart membranes that mimic the actual membranes found in cells.
As an analogy, in a leaf the transpiration of carbon dioxide and water is controlled by small pores, called stoma. These stoma are less abundant in succulents, like cacti, or aloe vera, then in rain forest vegetation.
The organelles of a cell, like the mitochondria, have similar properties.
This is another piece of the puzzle for nanotechnology, and may find use in batteries and electrochemical fuel cells. Time will tell.
Re:understanding life (Score:4, Informative)
Not first; maybe interesting, but not first (Score:4, Informative)
For a few years now, we've been able to control the porosity of membranes in vivo, not just in a laboratory dish, by exposing them to light. The work started at Caltech, where, a little over ten years ago, someone demonstrated the first cellular membrane channel that could be turned on and off by light -- it was a potassium channel (that is, a pore specially designed so that it only passed potassium ions) if I recall correctly. More recently, and more famously, a fellow at the MIT Media Lab was able to engineer rhodopsin (one of the pigments of the photo-sensitive cells in the retina) into similar ion channels resulting in much more efficiently controlled ion-specific porosity.
Again, this is work that has been done in whole living animals, not inanimate substance, a far more impressive feat. I've seen presentations where a mouse's behavior was controlled through turning on or off light going into an optical fiber implanted in its brain. The light controled the porosity of the cell membranes of neurons in a particular part of the brain: turn the light on, channels / pores are opened exiting the cells; turn the light off, channels are closed, quieting the cells down. (For those familiar with this work, I admit that this is a gross simplification for the purposes of the present argument.)
While the work at U. Rochester sounds interesting, the researchers there are certainly not the first to control membrane porosity through light. That, and the past tense of "to shine" is "shone".