Pantagraph: Corn byproduct promising as aid in medicine

[Tweed]

http://www.pantagraph.com/stories/030905/bus_20050309006.shtml

"The word nanotechnology might spark visions of artificial, enhanced body parts featured in the latest Star Trek movie.

But on the University of Illinois campus, Graciela Padua sees the microelectronic science only in terms of a corn byproduct called zein. It's produced as waste from the corn to ethanol fuel process.

Padua, a nanotechnologist, believes the bricklike shape of corn zein molecules could serve as cages or boxes that could carry other molecules within the human body.

For example, zein cages could carry scaffold-like material to parts of the body on which to grow sheets of skin cells instead of bulky clumps of tissue."

Corn; what can't we use it for?

[DELUSIONAL]

1. and for those of us who are deathly allergic to Corn???