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letsdothis1 ago

The email address [email protected] is for Dr. Melanie Loveridge at Warwick University https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/people/profile/?wmgid=1073

Melanie Loveridge is a materials chemist with a proven background in new materials development and characterisation in the disciplines of energy storage systems (batteries) and corrosion inhibition in coated metal systems. She completed an Engineering Doctorate sponsored by Akzo Nobel & Tata: An in-situ Scanning Kelvin Probe Applied to Mechanisms of Corrosion-driven Coating delamination in Organic Coated Steels (2004).

Since I've got melanin on the mind due to a previous post, I thought I'd look into any connections with melanin in this area of research and of course, there is.

Melanie has been involved with successful funding applications for EPSRC and TSB grants and collaborated in projects with top UK research groups. A significant time spent within industry (including a university spin-out company) has given her experience of being a specialist, leading teams and generating journal publications and inventions in international patents. Her research background is multi-disciplinary enabling cross-pollination and successes in taking concepts to material realities.

Skin pigment could power safe, implantable battery

Your body may use it to catch a tan, but now the skin pigment melanin has been repurposed for the first time to make batteries. These may one day offer a safer way to power electronic devices that can be swallowed or inserted into the human body for drug delivery or internal monitoring.

Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are widely used in electronics because they are very efficient and can hold their charge for long periods. But because they contain lithium, these batteries are potentially toxic if used long-term inside the body. So Christopher Bettinger at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, wanted to find a way to build batteries from biological materials.

letsdothis1 ago

Christopher Bettinger at Carnegie Mellon University>>

Collaboration with Ulijn Group (CUNY) published in Science

A product of a collaboration between Prof Rein Ulijn (CUNY) and the Bettinger Group on programmable melanin-like compounds was published in Science.

Polymeric peptide pigments with sequence-encoded properties

Melanins are a group of natural pigments that are the primary factor affecting skin color. Lampel et al. examined a family of melanin-inspired materials based on tripeptides containing tyrosine as precursors for polymeric pigments. They found that the supramolecular organization of the tripeptide assembly is the most important factor for the enzymatic oxidation, with the position of the tyrosine residue playing a dominant role. Thus, simply juggling the order of the peptides allowed tuning of the optical and electrical properties of the resulting polymers.

Short peptides have low barriers to application and can be easily scaled, suggesting near-term applications in cosmetics and biomedicine.

jangles ago

good work! this is what I have been looking for.