Flu is an interesting virus. What occurs in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter may be the flu we get in the winter that follows here in the Northern Hemisphere. And of course, vice versa. So you would think that our bio-pharmaceutical industry would have plenty of notice on how to formulate an effective vaccine.

But last winter they got it wrong and lots of people who had the vaccine also got the flu because the variant that hit here in North America was not the one the industry thought we would get.

That’s why I’m interested in how synthetic biology, that is the genetic engineering of vaccines, can allow pharmaceutical companies to speed up the process of developing vaccines in response to viral outbreaks. This means creating a synthetic virus with genes harvested during a disease outbreak and incorporated into an engineered organism.

The method has been tested in a drill in 2011 which mimicked a mock outbreak of an H7N9 outbreak, the bird flu. Novartis, the bio-pharmaceutical company started the test on a Monday morning and by Friday noon its scientists were growing and incubating live virus in cells in preparation to mass produce a vaccine. All done in less than five days.

How can synthetic biology help with other diseases and as a cure for seasonal illnesses? In May this year the Synthetic Biology Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology held a workshop in which scientists and researchers discussed ways to use the technology in treating cancer, engineering tissues, curing diabetes and other metabolic diseases, drug screening and vaccinations for infectious diseases. You can check out their findings yourself in the session reports.

The goal of those working in this burgeoning field is to develop within the next decade kill switches to turn off metabolic disorders in patients, more personalized and individualized therapies, and of course quick responses to outbreaks of highly infectious and spreadable diseases.

One commonly found disease in the Developing World is cholera. Can we stop it from infecting between 3 and 5 million and killing 120,000 every year? We know how cholera spreads – through contaminated food and water. We know how to create water filters to screen out most of the bacteria. But what if we could alter our bacterial flora in the gut to prevent Vibrio cholerae from causing the diarrhea and massive dehydration associated with the disease? At UCSF researchers are trying to do just that, preventing cholera infection in mice studies that use the E. coli virus as a mechanism for delivering new genetic material to gut bacteria. The altered bacteria blocks Vibrio cholerae from attacking the epithelial cell lining the bowel. The diagram below shows just how it works.

Expect to hear more about synthetic biology in future postings here.

The MIT method is based on electrochemical reactions. The PNNL method uses an organic solvent. Right now both have been successfully demonstrated on a small scale in their respective labs. Both need a project-scale implementation to prove that they are economically viable. Both solutions have been published in the journal, Energy & Environmental Science.

MIT uses a method containing amines that bind with CO2. What are amines? Amines are derivative compounds of ammonia in which one or more of the hydrogen atoms gets replaced by a substitute. Also known as alkylamines they have been used in scrubbers to remove hydrogen sulfide in petrochemical plants. Typically amines have been heated requiring lots of energy which makes CO2 capture cost prohibitive. But with the MIT discovery no heating is required. The amines in solution are passed through a device with positive and negative electrodes. As the amines absorb the CO2 they get pulled to one of the electrodes. Both are made of  copper and the amine interaction with the copper produces copper ions. These bind more readily with the amines and not the CO2. The amines then get attracted to the opposite electrode and the copper ions are removed. What’s left? The amines which get recirculated and the CO2 which is bubbled off for capture and storage. The process uses far less energy than any existing CO2 capture method currently used in test sites.

PNNL uses an organic solvent to absorb CO2. They then mix the solvent with a slightly warmed hydrocarbon. Then they cool the mixture and repeat the cycle. In cooling the solvent, hydrocarbon and CO2 separate. The solvent recirculates to capture more CO2. The total energy input is so small that any existing power plant could easily accommodate the retrofit.

Considering the general failure of commercial and pilot CO2 capture projects to date, if these two methods can scale they may breathe new life into the effort to capture and sequester carbon economically.

Wysips crystal prototypes are achieving 82% transparency and 8% energy conversion today with the next release expected to improve to 30% efficiency while providing enough power to a cellphone to increase talk time by 50% or keep it fully charged while on standby throughout the day. With several cell phone manufacturers interested the company expect to have its technology in products starting with releases in 2014. Estimated cost for the technology to the consumer will be an additional $2.30 US over current mobile phone sticker prices.

The technology isn’t just limited to cell phone applications. E-readers and tablets as well as billions of low power outdoor devices could use this type of energy-generating technology. Think billboards, road signs, transit shelters, kiosks, parking meters and more.

Wysips can be incorporated into windows and textiles. Imagine the windows in your car generating enough energy to run air conditioning on a hot day without drawing any power from the motor or the battery.Or equipping a stadium roof with Wysips fabric to provide energy for lighting. And Wysips isn’t limited to outdoor applications. It can be incorporated into indoor devices capturing energy from artificial lighting albeit with less efficiency than if used outdoors .

The government argues that there is little value creation in rural populations. They are largely subsistence based. Whereas urban populations create value and stimulate economic development. The government wants to create a domestic consumer market in China for the goods produced by the country’s burgeoning manufacturing sector which today is largely export driven.

But moving people off their lands into endless concrete high-rise apartments does not automatically create a consumer society. There have to be jobs for those who no longer are on farms or providing local services to their rural communities.

The transformation is expected to change the demographics of the country which today is roughly split 50/50. By 2025, however, if the government succeeds that will have changed to 70/30 in favour of urban dwellers.

To facilitate its policy he government is bulldozing villages and paving over farmland forcing rural dwellers to move to the many new cities which have sprouted from nothing in a very short period of time.

There is resistance with growing protests by rural dwellers who despite being compensated for the loss of their land, are fearful of fitting in to a new way of life. The government is giving these forced migrants free accommodation in the concrete highrises like those seen above. But rural skills don’t necessarily translate into urban jobs.

Along with the concrete jungle of apartments, China is building new schools, hospitals and mass transit to accommodate its new urbanites. By 2025 it hopes to hit its target of 900 million living in cities but what will the life of these displaced rural dwellers be like? Will they have the educational skills to transition to urban jobs? Will they be displaced and impoverished and form a new underclass that will resort to an “informal economy” similar to what we are witnessing in the rural to urban migration of the Developing World?

For the Chinese leadership they see an urban dominant population as a great asset in creating a consumer driven economy that is less dependent on exports to create wealth. Urban dwellers will fuel a new Great Leap Forward. Let’s hope that it is not as disastrous as the last Great Leap that China attempted under Mao Zedong, a policy in the late 1950s that caused chaos on a grand scale and was an admitted total failure.

In the article Pett states that we fell into this trap 10,000 years ago at the dawn of the Neolithic when we chose annual grains, legumes and oil seed crops to be our main source of plant nutrition. The result today is agricultural practices that are problematic with Pett in his article providing some statistics and challenges that we face because of our reliance on annuals:

• today 70% of the food calories we consume come from these types of crops;
• growing annuals for food contributes 24% of the greenhouse gases we produce globally;
• deep plowing for planting annuals contributes to soil erosion;
• or the alternative no-till planting requires lacing soils with enough chemicals to inhibit weeds and competitive plants.

At the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, researchers are looking at ways to alter our dependence on annuals by developing perennial versions of the plants we grow for food. For years I have planted a perennial garden rather than annual flowers. I have done this even at our new apartment downtown here in Toronto, planting perennials in pots rather than the typical flowering annuals. Why? Because perennials seem better equipped to handle environmental changes. They persist under the most difficult conditions. If it is too cold in the spring they tend to be self inhibiting waiting for the weather to improve. And they seem to be less demanding about soil conditions or needing artificial fertilizers. A good mulch cover in the fall works wonders.

The researchers at the Land Institute believe that perennial grains, oil seed crops and legumes can be developed reversing 10,000 years of agricultural mistakes made by us. They are doing this in two ways:

• discovering wild perennial plants with the best crop potential and domesticating them;
• or cross-breeding annuals with related perennials to create new hybrids.

The hope is to release the first perennial grain crop within a decade. The Institute is currently developing a wheat grass called Kernza. It looks a bit like wheat but like most perennials it grows more slowly. It develops extensive root systems (see image below) which hold the soil in place and retain moisture. It shows high variability when planted so a Kernza field isn’t as pretty as the wheat fields you see on the Prairies today. But it provides continuous coverage so the soil is not exposed to erosion. It needs less tending and as a bonus provides winter fodder for native and herding animals without losing its viability to propagate and produce subsequent harvests.

The Institute has been developing Kernza for 7 years and has harvested the crop to produce flour “excellent for use in biscuits, cookies, crackers, and muffins.” The yields to date are far less than those produced by annual wheat but the researchers believe they will soon match wheat in future harvests.

And Kernza is proving to have other unique benefits. Its protein content per kilogram is 20% higher than wheat. It produces more fibre, double the level of omega-3 fatty acids, five times the calcium and ten times the folate.

Other perennial projects at the Institute include development of a perennial variety of sorghum as well as perennial sunflowers.

Is the Institute unique in pursuing perennial crops? Hardly. We’ve been growing them as food sources for years. After all fruit and nut trees, bananas, palms, breadfruit, and avocados are all perennials. Several types of perennial beans and tubers provide staple crops for many tropical and subtropical countries. But none of the above equal the volume of food we get from grains like wheat and rice, two of the dominant agricultural crops grown on this planet. We can, however, learn from our experience in cultivating perennials, ways to develop even more choices and in the process reduce the toll we are putting on precious top soils and fresh water while feeding the planet.

For a small number of companies in the biomedical field who were pursuing this approach it means their research into gene therapies will probably take a different tack or they will be out of business. My guess is biomedical research interested in patents will look at synthetic DNA and creating delivery mechanisms for providing genetic material to effect cures.

But better yet, this ruling should open up the application of genetic research in a much wider manner bringing in the collective wisdom of numerous universities, medical research centres and hospitals who are actively pursuing DNA-based therapies to deal with many diseases including cancer.

• MS Breakthrough Holds Promise for Treating Autoimmune Diseases and Responses;
• Non-invasive Treatment May Be a Cure for Blindness;
• Macrophages the Key to Limb Regeneration for Salamanders at Least;
• Can we Feed 9 Billion by 2050? – New Models May Help us Get There;
• China Begins to Address CO2 Emissions with City-by-City Cap and Trade.

New Clinical Trial for Treating Multiple Sclerosis Produces Promising Results

How do you switch off a selective autoimmune response in the body without compromising the entire immune system? That’s what researchers at Northwestern University set out to do in developing a treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is an autoimmune disorder in which the body’s own immune system attacks the myelin that insulates the nerve cells of the spinal cord, brain and eyes. When the myelin is destroyed those who suffer from the disease experience numbness, potential paralysis, blindness and in extreme cases death.

What the researchers found is that they could deliver billions of myelin antigens by placing them in a patient’s white blood cells and then injecting those cells into the body. In this way the body would recognize the antigens and build a tolerance to them. Current MS therapies tend to suppress the entire immune system leaving those being treated open to opportunistic diseases.

The clinical trial involved nine patients with those receiving the highest dose of white blood cells showing the greatest reduction in autoimmune response to myelin.

If this approach works with MS it may become a protocol for other autoimmune diseases such as asthma and arthritis, and for dealing with allergies that cause anaphylaxis.

New Treatment for Blindness is Noninvasive

UC Berkeley researchers are inserting normal genes into eyes to help restore sight for diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. The team of researchers are using an adenovirus that has had 10 amino acids on its outer shell altered to allow it to pass through retinal cells to reach the eye’s light sensors. The diagram below illustrates how this type of gene therapy works.

Traditionally treatment for blinding diseases involved inserting a needle deep into eye which often lead to retinal detachment. But this new therapy is far more benign. All the doctor does is inject the adenovirus into the liquid vitreous humor behind the lens. The virus then does the rest finding its way through the many cell layers of the retina to replace the defective genes in the photoreceptors.

The therapy may also be used not just to insert genes but also to knock out genes that are causing deterioration in vision such as what occurs with age-related conditions like macular degeneration.

Immune Cells Key to Limb Regeneration  in Salamanders

Macrophages are white blood cells that engulf and digest cellular debris and pathogens and stimulate other immune cells in the event of an injury or invasion by a foreign entity. They play a critical role in the immune system. But what role do macrophages play in limb regeneration?

Apparently a significant one according to a study just published in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That is if we are talking about axolotl, an aquatic salamander that is the subject of the study. When macrophages were eliminated from an amputated limb site in axolotl the salamander was unable to regenerate a lost limb. When a small number of macrophages were present the limb regenerated but at a slower rate than normal. So obviously there is something that macrophages do that causes tissue to regenerate.

Salamanders can be a template for limb regeneration in humans if we can reverse engineer what happens when a limb is lost. Instead of scar tissue forming at the wound site researchers hope with the right macrophage responses they can activate limb regrowth.

Is Feeding Nine Billion Humans Even Possible on This Planet?

With over one billion seriously malnourished today in world of 7.3 billion, how will humans cope in 2050 when our population is expected to exceed 9 billion? In this month’s Nature Climate Change, an international team of scientists, members of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project or AgMIP, shared a study on wheat production involving 27 different crop models and taking into consideration climate change, soil, precipitation patterns, and other factors.

Does the study give us an answer for 2050? Not yet. But it is hoped that by running the simulations and models and sharing the results with the Developed and Developing World countries that policies and procedures can be put in place to impact agricultural production of wheat positively.

China Implementing Carbon Cap-and-Trade in Select Cities Before National Rollout

It’s a well intentioned strategy but China’s first steps into controlling its CO2 emissions is built around intensity rather than total emissions. But before I go into the difference between the two you should know a little bit more about the program.

Beginning on June 18 as reported in Nature, the International Weekly Journal of Science, China will institute a carbon cap-and-trade policy for the city of Shenzhen and its more than 630 industrial sites. Shenzhen is just outside of Hong Kong and one of economic miracles in China’s growth over the last quarter century. Companies in Shenzhen are being given carbon quotas. If they exceed them they can buy credits from companies that are below their quotas. By 2015 China intends to add the cities of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing as well as Guangdong and Hubei provinces to the cap-and-trade quota system. That will be followed in 2016 by a national quota system.

So China is committed to cutting its carbon but it is measuring it by intensity rather than total emissions. Intensity is the same measure that the Canadian government uses to show its commitment to reducing carbon emissions. But intensity doesn’t if an economy continues to grow because all it does is reduce the emissions per unit of production. So if production triples and intensity goes down by 40% total emissions continue to grow.

With some of the most polluted cities in the world as seen in the compiled pictures below, China, at least, is making a start. How well will it work? What watchdog will ensure that companies are playing by the rules? Will corruption and government cronyism foul up the results? We will see.

A Postscript

Some of you were kind enough to suggest new stories in the last week. The China story was one of them. I look forward to hearing from more of you and as always welcome your questions and comments. Thanks for dropping by.

- Len Rosen

The Scanadu Scout is a medical scanner packed with a mashup of sensors. Unlike the tricorder of Star Trek you cannot just pass it over the body in Reikian fashion. It must touch you. Just place it on your forehead for ten seconds and it measures key vital signs.

And unlike the tricorder the Scout itself does not display the medical information. That gets transmitted by Bluetooth to your smartphone where it is displayed in easy-to-read output.

Designed by a company at the NASA Ames Research Park in Mountain View, California, the Scout recently launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo. Investors get a Scout for a $149 investment if they are early birds. One thousand have already put money down. For those who are late to the investment table you can put down $199 as a “First Responder” to reserve your Scout.

The company wanted to raise $100,000. So far with 9 days to go in the campaign the funding has reached $863,031 and is still climbing.

Scanadu Scout is the equivalent of the medical Tricorder seen on Star Trek. An early version of the device is seen in the image below.

The tricorder was a portable medical lab in episodes of the orignal sci-fi adventure and evolved over time in subsequent series to look much more like today’s smartphones.

The Scout bears no resemblance but provides a rich set of medical data using a sensor-laden package smaller than a hockey puck. The Scout when placed on the forehead for 10 seconds measures:

• heart rate
• skin and core body temperature
• oxygen saturation levels
• respiration rates
• blood pressure
• echo-cardiogram
• emotional stress

Results are captured and transmitted to a smartphone.

What is the technology behind the Scout? It is the same as the one being used by the Martian rover, Curiosity, the 32-bit RTS Micrium platform chosen for the Sample Analysis at Mars module (SAM).

So why does Scanadu need your money? Because to become a certified medical device they require U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. That means extensive clinical testing. And for those who invest it is an opportunity to participate in that testing putting the device through its paces to ensure that it passes as a reliable, over-the-counter diagnostic tool.

So if your game and want to experience a real Dr. McCoy experience pledge a few dollars on Indiegogo and join a Trekkian future today.

Where would you use a carbonate fuel cell as a carbon capture device? Placed to siphon off gases in the exhaust of coal-fired power plants, a carbonate fuel cell could take CO2 from the air stream and concentrate it to about 70% by volume. It would then pressurize the gas and store it. The company believes that such a process could capture CO2 at a cost of between $20 and $30 per ton.

The captured CO2 has commercial application. It can be used in greenhouse operations, or for enhancing oil recovery from depleted wells. In the case of the latter the fuel cells would serve a double purpose. Gaseous byproducts from oil extraction would feed the carbonate fuel cell allowing it to capture the CO2 which then would be pumped into the depleted reservoir to further enhance oil recovery while permanently sequestering the gas underground.

Compared to other technologies used for carbon capture and storage, carbonate fuel cells look like a pretty good option but the current company products need to get much bigger. Right now a typical carbonate fuel cell generates a few megawatts of power.  You can see one of FuelCell Energy’s biggest products in the picture below. This one is being delivered to the Energy Cell Park in Bridgeport, Connecticut where it will be used to generate power for the state utility. The cell ways 50,000 kilograms (110,000 pounds).  But this baby isn’t big enough for the kind of fuel cell needed by power utilities and oil fields to capture CO2.

FuelCell Energy, however, is working to scale the technology beyond the 14.9 Megawatt stack you see in the picture and they are doing this with cooperation and $2.4 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s because the power industry will require a carbonate fuel cell capable of generating hundreds of Megawatts to make it commercially viable and to keep the cost of carbon capture within the $20 to $30 per ton range.

In fact, collected data from the Washington State University in Seattle, suggests that greenhouse gas emissions from composites are up to 330% higher than timber harvested from redwood forests for use in decking and other construction. Currently U.S. statistics show that the plastic wood market, around for the last 20 years accounts for 10% of the total market for decking materials and is expected to grow to 32% by 2016.

What are the implications of replacing wood with plastic wood? In an article appearing in the June 5th issue of Nature, the author, Jeff Tollefson, describes how New York’s Coney Island pier is being reconstructed not with wood but recycled plastic wood over steel-reinforced concrete. So what was once a boardwalk made from wooden boards will no longer exist. Instead composite plastic wood will be underfoot.

Plastic wood is most commonly made from high-density polyethylene, polypropylene or polystyrene often recovered from waste. The plastic is combined with wood waste which can be collected from a variety of sources including sawmills and construction sites. The collected wood shavings and splinters are ground into a fine powder and mixed with the plastic. Some plastic wood manufacturers don’t even use wood. Instead they substitute agricultural fibers and in some cases combine them with fiberglass to create a lumber substitute. The market for these products includes automotive parts, pallets, playground equipment, picnic tables and benches, chairs, and substitutes for timber in landscaping, decking, docks and railroad ties.