Web Desk(October 4, 2017): Scientists have found a way to harvest electricity from tears. In recent lab experiments, researcher yield an electric current when pressurized. Lysozyme is found in tears and saliva, as well as the whites of bird eggs and the milk of mammals.
Quartz also possesses the ability to generate electricity when pressurized, a quality known as piezoelectricity.
The ability makes quartz useful for a variety technologies. The material is often used to make resonators inside mobile phones, ultrasound devices and other types of sensors.
“While piezoelectricity is used all around us, the capacity to generate electricity from this particular protein had not been explored,” Aimee said.
“The extent of the piezoelectricity in lysozyme crystals is significant. It is of the same order of magnitude found in quartz.
“Crystals are the gold-standard for measuring piezoelectricity in non-biological materials. Our team has shown that the same approach can be taken in understanding this effect in biology,” said Tofail.
“This is a new approach as scientists so far have tried to understand piezoelectricity in biology using complex hierarchical structures such as tissues, cells or polypeptides rather than investigating simpler fundamental building blocks.”
“The impact of this discovery in the field of biological piezoelectricity will be huge and Bernal scientists are leading from the front the progress in this field,” He said.
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