From 7th to 11th September, Barcelona will host the Trends in Nanotechnology (TNT) 2009 conference. This high-level scientific meeting provides a broad insight into top level research in all the areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology, as well as information to the nano community on related policy, regulation and networking initiatives, organised into a series of specific sessions.
“Ask the Experts”: In an interview, Josep Samitier, Associate Director of IBEC, talks about the potential, the impact and the contributions of nanobiotechnology.
Josep Planell, Director of the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, explains his work on tissue regeneration at the nanoscale.
Tsukuba, Japan. On 24th of July NIMS (National Institute for Materials Science) of Japan, and IBEC (Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for collaboration on the “Design of Biomaterials Surfaces and Biosensors for Cell Function Manipulation and Analysis”.
Imagine an opaque bag in front of you and you wish to figure out what’s inside, what would you do? You can’t open it. So you press and you feel the content, then you might be able to tell whether it is a bag of glass beads or soft balls.
Researchers at IBEC, IRB Barcelona and the UB identify the strategy used by enterobacteria to acquire resistance and pathogenicity.The increase in the number of infections caused by multi-resistant bacteria is a growing public health concern, above all in hospital settings, where infections of this kind may have serious consequences.
The first cover of a top nano-science journal this month features the work of several IBEC researchers. The journal Small (Volume 5. No. 11 – June 5 2009) dedicates its cover to a paper published by four researchers from IBEC´s BioNanoPhotonics group led by Dra. María García-Parajo and two scientists from the Nijmegen Center for Molecular Life Sciences (NCMLS), in the Netherlands.
The Cystic Fibrosis Association of Catalonia (Asociación Catalana de Fibrosis Quística) provides active support to the research conducted by Doctor Eduard Torrents, a member of IBEC´s Microbial Biotechnology and Host-Pathogen Interaction Group, into the enzyme that promotes the growth of the bacteria linked to this disease.
An article by Dr. Xavier Trepat, senior researcher of IBEC´s Cellular and respiratory biomechanics group and the Department of Physiology Sciences of the University of Barcelona, contributes for the first time an experimental answer to the question of how cells move during biological processes as diverse as the development, metastasis, or regeneration of tissues.