An Interesting Visitor

In the span of three months since the Yellow Five blog's conception, we have received visitors from around the world. While we would like to believe our blog is being enjoyed in places like Finland and China, we know that these foreign views are most likely the result of random clicking. However, about one month ago, we received a very special visitor to our blog named Fiorenzo Omenetto. He has been featured on our blog here. Omenetto primarily does research with silk and its effectiveness as a nanomaterial. He has been named an Oppenheimer Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011. About our blog, Omenetto commented saying:

"Yes, of course – there are so many interesting things out there and it's really nice to see you review these things and select the ones that you think are important or that strike your imagination. Keep going and put more!"

We are very thankful to Omenetto for taking the time to view our blog, and we wish him the best in his future research. To get more of Omenetto's research, check out his website here and his twitter over here. We interviewed him, and the contents of this interview can be viewed below. Once again, thanks for viewing our blog, and we hope to have another post up and running next week. See you soon!

The Interview:

Q: Can you introduce yourself?

Hi YellowFive! I'm Fio Omenetto a professor of Biomedical Engineering and a Prof. of Physics at Tufts University in Boston.

Q: What made you so interested in researching silk?

A chance conversation in the hallway with Dave Kaplan, who is now one of my closest collaborators. I didn't even know what silk was before coming to Tufts (OK, I did, but had not remotely thought about it as a photonics or electronic material, much less on the nanoscale. )

Q: What is the most exciting result of your research so far?

I think for me just the discovery of silk and the things that it can do at multiple scales, the favorable properties of the material, and how it can reinvent technology as we know it.

Q: Do you feel that the silk optics that you recently created and that we mentioned in our blog is a big accomplishment?

I think it is, but I'm biased… I think being mentioned in your blog is quite flattering! (thanks)

Q: What is the most interesting thing about being a researcher?

The fact that you have endless puzzles to solve, that you get to work with great people solving them, and that you get to imagine new things all the time (because, in fact, not all the things that you imagine or that you research work!).

Q: What do you think is the most interesting aspect about nanomaterials?

My first research love (and background) is in optics and physics – I have always liked the structural interaction of materials on the nanoscale with electromagnetic radiation – structural color, photonics band gaps and related things. I like how structure affects function, and specifically how nanostructures affect light propagation (and electromagnetic waves in general).

Q: What inspired you to look into silk and nanomaterials?

I was just trying to connect the dots between what I liked and something new.

Implantable Silk Optics

In one of our earlier posts, we introduced you to the work of Fiorenzo Omenetto and a TED Talk he gave about the potential applications of silk in the medical industry and how silk can be used to fabricate better medical implants. Now, Omenetto and his team of researchers at Tufts University have created an silk optical implant.

A microscopic image of a silk optical implant embedded with gold nanoparticles

The optical implants are made of a purified silk protein and arranged in microprism array by pouring the solution of silk protein into molds of multiple micro-sized prism reflectors. After the cast solution dries, a silk sheet is formed that looks very similar to reflective tape. The benefit of fabricating silk sheets in the MPAs is that when the silk films are implanted into the body, reflect back photons that are ordinarily lost with reflection-based imaging technologies, which allows for enhanced imaging even in deep tissue. 

These silk optical implants, which are an improvement to current tissue imaging techniques, can do much more than simple providing imaging for doctors. The devices can be engineered to also administer therapeutic treatments to patients. The researchers are able to embed both gold nanoparticles and the cancer drug doxorubicin into the silk sheets to treat targeted parts of the body were the silk sheets can be implanted. The benefit of this is that it allows for the precise delivery of drugs while also providing a mechanism with which to monitor the body with. When silk sheet is no longer needed, it dissolved into the body, doing no harm because it is biocompatible.

For more information visit Fiorenzo Omenetto's website.

Interview with Fiorenzo Omenetto

Recently Fiorenzo Omenetto appeared on Public Radio Exchange for the Science Update. Have a listen below: