Membranes - Page 16

Researchers from MIT are developing graphene based membranes for gas separation. They expect those membranes to have very high permeance which would lead into high energy efficiency. The membranes will also have a high degree of selectivity through size exclusion. The research will focus on separating methane from hydrogen at first - which is useful for natural gas processing.

This research was just granted some seed money and will last for 2 years.

Oxford Nanopore has reached an agreement with Harvard University to develop technology that uses graphene for DNA and RNA sequencing. This technology was developed in the Harvard laboratories of Professors Jene Golovchenko, Daniel Branton, and Charles Lieber and Oxford Nanopore now has exclusive rights to develop and commercialize it.

The Harvard team used graphene to separate two chambers containing ionic solutions, and created a hole - a nanopore in the graphene. The group demonstrated that the graphene nanopore could be used as a trans-electrode, measuring a current flowing through the nanopore between two chambers. The trans-electrode was used to measure variations in the current as a single molecule of DNA was passed through the nanopore. This resulted in a characteristic electrical signal that reflected the size and conformation of the DNA molecule.