Author: Kate Whiting / Source: Big Think
Imagine a future lit by bioluminescent LEDs that not only use fewer of Earth’s resources to manufacture, but also improve your mood by mimicking the sun throughout the day.
It could be closer than you think, according to Dr Rubén Costa, a young scientist who believes we’re on the brink of a bio and nanotechnology revolution that could close the gap between nature and the man-made environment.
“What we need to do is build a bridge between these materials that we know and understand, and technologies,” says the Spanish researcher in an interview with the Forum. “This will be the next revolution, I do believe.”
Costa, who is on the list of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators under 35, has pioneered the stabilization of light-emitting proteins found in jellyfish, outside of an aqueous solution, to create biological LEDs.
“I remember this very precise moment when we were able to peel off the rubber from the glass, put it on the UV light and it was still green,” he says of his ‘lightbulb’ moment in 2015, when the fluorescent proteins prepared in bacteria “survived in an almost water-free medium”, keeping the structure and functionality to emit light.
So excited was he by the discovery, Costa had to see a medic the following day because he’d spent too long looking at his team’s creation – the fluorescent polymer – under UV light and was suffering from dry eyes: “The doctor just told me, ‘Don’t do it again!'”
Tackling the impossible
Jellyfish naturally glow to communicate.Image: REUTERS/Dani Cardona
Costa’s research brings together the work of several Nobel prize-winning scientists. The late Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist Professor Osamu Shimomura won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2008 for his discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) in jellyfish.
Professor Martin Chalfie, who shared the prize, was able to extract the DNA that expressed the protein and genetically modify a worm to make it glow. GFPs are now used by molecular biologists to track genes.
In 2014, American electronic engineer Professor Shuji Nakamura won the Nobel Prize for Physics, together with two colleagues, for the invention of the ‘efficient blue light-emitting diode’ or LED, which Costa calls the “most powerful technology we have ever produced as human beings”.
After hearing a talk on fluorescent proteins at a conference, Costa was intrigued by the “beautiful material” and the idea of somehow using it to power lights. The challenge of conquering ‘the impossible’ – stabilizing fluorescent proteins – was too much to resist.
“I never thought you could make technology with bio-compounds,” he admits. “I come from a world where basically everyone is telling me bio is not stable enough. But they are…
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