Virus-Assembled Batteries Breakthrough

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

The biggest thing holding back technology today is not price, or marketing, or even perfection: it’s the battery. Battery life holds us back. It hampers us with endless chargers and low battery warnings. And so we dream. I dream of a laptop that runs for a week on one charge. Don’t get me started..

But today it looks like dreams can come true. An MIT researcher has developed a way to harness the virus to make super-small, super-long life batteries.

Researchers have demonstrated that genetically engineered viruses can assemble active battery materials into a compact, regular structure, to make an ultra-thin, transparent battery electrode that stores nearly three times as much energy as those in today’s lithium-ion batteries. It is the first step toward high-capacity, self-assembling batteries.

“Most of it was done through genetic manipulation — giving an organism that wouldn’t normally make battery electrodes the information to make a battery electrode, and to assemble it into a device,” says Angela Belcher, a researcher on the project and an MIT professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering. “My dream is to have a DNA sequence that codes for the synthesis of materials, and then out of a beaker to pull out a device. And I think this is a big step along that path.”

The researchers, in work reported online this week in Science, used M13 viruses to make the positive electrode of a lithium-ion battery, which they tested with a conventional negative electrode. The virus is made of proteins, most of which coil to form a long, thin cylinder. By adding sequences of nucleotides to the virus’ DNA, the researchers directed these proteins to form with an additional amino acid that binds to cobalt ions. The viruses with these new proteins then coat themselves with cobalt ions in a solution, which eventually leads, after reactions with water, to cobalt oxide, an advanced battery material with much higher storage capacity than the carbon-based materials now used in lithium-ion batteries. Source: Technology Review