Open Access

This study explores the potential of re-purposing end-of-life commercial supercapacitors as electrochemical desalination cells, aligning with circular economy principles. A commercial 500-Farad supercapacitor was disassembled, and its carbon electrodes underwent various degrees of modification. The most straightforward modification involved NaOH-etching of the aluminum current collector to produce free-standing carbon films. More advanced modifications included CO2 activation and binder-added wet processing of the electrodes. When evaluated as electrodes for electrochemical desalination via capacitive deionization of low-salinity (20 mM) NaCl solutions, the minimally modified NaOH-etched carbon electrodes achieved an average desalination capacity of 5.8 mg g−1 and a charge efficiency of 80 %. In contrast, the CO2-activated, wet-processed electrodes demonstrated an improved desalination capacity of 7.9 mg g−1 and a charge efficiency above 90 % with stable performance over 20 cycles. These findings highlight the feasibility and effectiveness of recycling supercapacitors for sustainable water desalination applications, offering a promising avenue for resource recovery and re-purposing in pursuing environmental sustainability.

The laser welding of Cu–Al alloys for battery applications in the automotive industry presents significant challenges due to the high reflectivity of copper. Inadequate bonding and low mechanical strength may occur when the laser radiation is directed toward the copper side in an overlap configuration welding. To tackle these challenges, a laser surface treatment technique is implemented to enhance the absorption characteristics and overcome the reflective nature of the copper material. However, elevating the surface roughness and heat-energy input over threshold values leads to heightened temperature and extreme weld. This phenomenon escalates the formation of detrimental intermetallic compounds (IMC), creating defects like cracks and porosity. Metallurgical analysis, which is time-consuming and expensive, is usually used in studies to detect these phases and defects. However, to comprehensively evaluate the weld quality and discern the impact of surface structure, adopting a more innovative approach that replaces conventional cross-sectional metallography is essential. This article proposes a model based on the image feature extraction of the welds to study the effect of the laser-based structure and the other laser parameters. It can detect defects and identify the weld quality by weld classification. However, due to the complexity of the photo features, the system requires image processing and a convolutional neural network (CNN). Results show that the predictive model based on trained data can detect different weld categories and recognize unstable welds. The project aims to use a monitoring model to guarantee optimized and high-quality weld series production. To achieve this, a deeper study of the parameters and the microstructure of the weld is utilized, and the CNN model analyzes the features of 1310 pieces of weld photos with different weld parameters.

Peptide drugs have seen rapid advancement in biopharmaceutical development, with over 80 candidates approved globally. Despite their therapeutic potential, the clinical translation of peptide drugs is hampered by challenges in production yields and stability. Engineered bacterial therapeutics is a unique approach being explored to overcome these issues by using bacteria to produce and deliver therapeutic compounds at the body site of use. A key advan‑ tage of this technology is the possibility to control drug delivery within the body in real time using genetic switches. However, the performance of such genetic switches suffers when used to control drugs that require post‑translational modifications or are toxic to the host. In this study, these challenges were experienced when attempting to establish a thermal switch for the production of a ribosomally synthesized and post‑translationally modified peptide antibiotic, darobactin, in probiotic E. coli. These challenges were overcome by developing a thermo‑amplifier circuit that combined the thermal switch with a T7 RNA Polymerase. Due to the orthogonality of the Polymerase, this strategy overcame limitations imposed by the host transcriptional machinery. This circuit enabled production of pathogen‑inhibitory levels of darobactin at 40 °C while maintaining leakiness below the detection limit at 37 °C. Furthermore, the thermo‑amplifier circuit sustained gene expression beyond the thermal induction duration such that with only 2 h of induction, the bacteria were able to produce pathogen‑inhibitory levels of darobactin. This performance was maintained even in physiologically relevant simulated conditions of the intestines that include bile salts and low nutrient levels.

Nature achieves diverse biological functions through structure formation. Inspired by the controlled formation of polypeptide nanostructures in cells, synthetic methods have been developed to assemble artificial nanostructures and organelle-like compartments within living cells. While these synthetic intracellular assemblies have mostly been used to disrupt cellular processes, their potential to induce a gain of function within cells remains unexplored. Here, we introduce redox-sensitive isopeptides that transform into self-assembling linear peptides inside human cytotoxic T cells in response to intracellular levels of glutathione. The in situ formation of synthetic peptide nanostructures in cytotoxic T cells leads to cellular stiffening, establishing a direct interface between biochemically driven peptide assembly and mechanobiological effects. This change in biophysical properties, along with increased phosphorylation of signaling proteins associated with T cell activation, correlates with a significant enhancement in the efficacy of cytotoxic T cells to eliminate cancer cells. Our findings elucidate the cellular impact of synthetic peptide nanostructures assembled within living cytotoxic T cells and demonstrate their ability to modulate and enhance effector immune cell responses.

Self-assembly, a fundamental property of living matter, drives the interconnected cellular organization of tissues. Synthetic cell models have been developed as bionic materials to mimic inherent cellular features such as self-assembly. Here, we leverage co-assembly of synthetic and natural cells to create hybrid living 3D cancer cultures. We screened synthetic cell models, including giant unilamellar vesicles, coacervates, microdroplet emulsions, proteinosomes, and colloidosomes, for their ability to form hybrid tumoroids. Our results identify the balance of inter- and extracellular adhesion and synthetic cell surface tension as key material properties driving successful co-assembly of hybrids. We further demonstrate that these synthetic cells can establish artificial tumor immune microenvironments (ART-TIMEs), mimicking immunogenic signals within tumoroids. Using the ART-TIME approach, we identify co-signaling mechanisms between PD-1 and CD2 as a driver in immune evasion of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Our findings demonstrate the 3D bottom-up self-assembly of hybrid cancer microenvironments to replace immune components with defined bionic materials, pushing the boundaries to functionally integrating living and non-living matter.