Gene-splicing Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have built a longer-lasting lithium battery by training a tiny virus to do most of the work for them.

Working in a materials laboratory at MIT, the scientists altered two genes in a virus they dubbed M13. Those alterations changed the behavior of the virus in such a way that it built itself a body shell out of a compound called iron phosphate, then attached themselves to a pre-built carbon nanotube. That combination forms a very small, but very powerful, electrode.

Angela Belcher, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led the research, said, “It has some of the same capacity and energy power performance as the best commercially available state-of-the-art batteries. We could run an iPod on it for about three times as long as current iPod batteries. If we really scale it, it would be used in a car.”

A battery built using such electrodes could possibly produce more long-lasting memory devices such as MP3 players or cellular telephones. The devices would also be far more environmentally friendly than current battery technologies, according to a TVNZ article. The technology is inherently green, since it involves having a tiny bit of nature do the construction for us.

After all, Belcher says, “We are having organisms make the materials for us. We are confined to temperatures and solvents – water – that organisms can live in. It’s a clean technology. We can’t do anything that kills our organisms.”

The discovery was reported in the journal Science. The article notes that the genetically engineered viruses were designed to grow shells of amorphous iron phosphate, which is not usually a good conductor. However, it produces a useful battery material when patterned at the nanoscale – a microscopic molecular scale.
Normally-manufactured lithium batteries have the benefits of being powerful and light, but they do not release their electrons very quickly. The virus-made batteries did release quickly, however, which translates into more battery power.

Belcher said, “My students hate it when I say we sit back and let them (the viruses) do the work. We put a lot of work in too. But once you have the right genetic sequence and have the right proteins then you just put them in solution with water and ions and they template the battery in the same way an abalone templates a shell. They build little shells around themselves.”

It is hard to beat a technology that has no choice but to be environmentally friendly, and which essentially build itself. The teamå is already working on second-generation units that use manganese or nickel to build batteries with higher voltage and capacity. This could be technology that we can use to our advantage without ruining the environment around us.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 2:47 pm under Green Technology, Science and technology.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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