News & V iews part of ISSN 1743-5889 10.2217/NNM.12.191 © 2013 Future Medicine Ltd Nanomedicine (2013) 8(1), 13–15 13 News & V iews News & V iews News & V iews Research Highlights Highlights from the last year in nanomedicine Synthetic biology attempts to reproduce emergent behaviors from natural biology with the goal of creating artificial life. The main challenge in this field is the reduction of complex phenomena into functional components, which can be individually engineered and later combined to repli- cate the macroscopic behavior of the model biological system. Nawroth and coworkers reverse-engineered the mechanics of jelly- fish propulsion by studying the structural design, stroke kinematics and fluid–solid interactions of the jellyfish, and exploit- ing the natural properties of the living and nonliving materials used in the design. The artificial jellyfish, dubbed ‘medu- soids’, were composed of a bilayer of liv- ing muscle tissue and synthetic elastomer arranged in freely movable lobes around a central disc. Medusoid propulsion, like that of a jellyfish, was externally driven by electrically paced power and recovery strokes that alternately contracted the body into a quasi-closed ‘bell’ and then relaxed into the open-lobed form. The muscle layer, comprised of anisotropic rat cardiac tissue that intrinsically enables spatiotemporally synchronous contraction, replicated the power stroke of the jellyfish. The recovery stroke, which is a consequence of elastic recoil in the jellyfish compliant matrix, was replicated by tuning the stiffness of the synthetic elastomer substrate. The geometry was further refined to allow the formation of overlapping boundary layers between lobes, thereby resisting flow across the lobe gaps. Qualitative and quantita- tive comparisons of jellyfish and medusoid propulsion showed that the engineered sys- tem was able to replicate the momentum, transport and body lengths traveled per swimming stroke of the natural system. This serves as a powerful demonstration of biomimetic swimming of a simple, natu- ral life form, that can be engineered from a few materials and some well-arranged cells. It also represents an important develop- mental milestone in the rise of biological actuators and has implications in tissue engineering and drug discovery/screening applications. Reverse engineering jellyfish with rat heart cells Evaluation of: Nawroth JC, Lee H, Feinberg AW et al. A tissue- engineered jellyfish with biomimetic propulsion. Nat. Biotechnol. 30, 792–797 (2012). Evaluation of: Duan X, Li Y, Rajan NK, Routenberg DA, Modis Y, Reed MA. Quantification of the affinities and kinetics of protein interactions using silicon nanowire biosensors. Nat. Nanotechnol. 7(6), 401–407 (2012). Brian Dorvel 1,2 , Gregory Damhorst 1,2 , Vincent Chan 2,3 , Jiwook Shim 2,4 , Shouvik Banerjee 2,5 , Caroline Cvetkovic 2,3 , Ritu Raman 2,3 & Rashid Bashir* 2,3,4 1 Department of Biophysics & Computatonal Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, IL, USA 2 Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 208 N Wright St, Urbana, IL 61801, USA 3 Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, IL, USA 4 Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, IL, USA 5 Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, IL, USA *Author for correspondence: rbashir@illinois.edu Financial & competing interests disclosure The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manu- script. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testi- mony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties. No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript. Silicon nanowire biosensors prove beneficial for monitoring the kinetics of protein interactions Silicon nanowires operating as field effect transistors (Si-NW FETs) have proven to be a versatile tool for sens- ing biological analytes, directly turning the analytes surface interaction into an electrical signal. Consequently, Si-NW FETs have been able to measure a diverse scope of biological entities (proteins,