The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has garnered a $1.3 million share of a $20 million grant that is funding national research of the toll nanoparticles from manmade products take on the environment.
The $20 million grant, awarded to the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, will expand the center’s science team from faculty members at six institutions to faculty of 12 institutions across the country.
The broader pool of expertise will allow the center to engage in more comprehensive research of how nanoparticles interact with living organisms at the molecular level, according to Rebecca Klaper, a professor at UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences and a co-principal investigator at the center.
Klaper has worked for the center since its founding three years ago and currently leads its research of nanoparticles’ effects on cells and organisms.
Nanoparticles are miniscule pieces factored into manmade products, such as sunscreen and sporting goods. The Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology spreads its research of products and their nanoparticles among several industries – analyzing products like battery materials, coatings, agricultural materials and components of electronics.
The center, which operates out of the labs of each member institution, assesses existing and new products to gauge the extent of their environmental impact. Beyond assessment of products, the center engages in product redesign, aiming to create materials that are “benign by design,” Klaper said, so that they do not have a negative impact on the environment.
“Our concrete goals are to make predictions about how nanomaterials will interact with a wide variety of organisms and then use that information to create materials that are benign by design,” she said.
The $20 million grant has been awarded to the center from the National Science Foundation, which provided startup funding for the center in 2012. Grant dollars will extend over five years with potential to extend for a full decade, pending projects pursued within the center and their progress, according to Klaper.
With a knowledge base of environmental contaminants, Klaper has been partnering with chemists from across the country looking deeper into nanoparticles. Klaper’s efforts have helped shed light on toxic effects specific kinds of nanoparticles can have on fish.
With new grant dollars, Klaper will now add to the number of fish and animals used in studies. Most of the center’s work in the last three years has focused on ways nanoparticles impact bacteria, which are single-celled organisms, and multi-celled organisms known as daphnia.
Klaper’s future projects will highlight the different impacts nanoparticles have on different cell types across organisms.
“Our role is studying the expansion of the original biological work into a broader question of how might the nanoparticles interact with more of the organisms that are out in the environment and how the environment affects what the nanoparticles look like to the organism,” she said of UWM’s involvement in the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology.
The $1.3 million allocated to UWM will flow both into Klaper’s lab as well as into the School of Freshwater Science’s Great Lakes Genomic Center, through which researchers will use genomic tools to observe how nanoparticles interact with freshwater organisms.
Along with UWM and UW-Madison, the center’s partnering institutions are: the University of Minnesota, the University of Illinois, Northwestern University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Tuskegee University, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Iowa, Augsburg College and Georgia Tech.
The center is directed by UW-Madison chemistry professor Robert Hamers.
