Technique likely safe for human cells; has potential for sterilizing wounds, blood products. Life-threatening bacteria are becoming ever more resistant to antibiotics, making the search for alternatives to antibiotics an increasingly urgent challenge. For certain applications, one alternative may be a special type of laser. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that lasers that emit ultrashort pulses of light can kill multidrug-resistant bacteria and hardy bacterial spores. The findings, available online in the Journal…
How the ACE2 receptor blocks the ‘gateway’ into human cells. A new precision strategy to hinder the infection of the coronavirus and its rapid spread between cells will come from Italian scientific research, destined to be the basis of a new drug, for which a patent has already been filed. The road that will lead to the drug has started from the study sponsored by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Sant’Anna School), University of…
Breakthrough discovery could accelerate renewable plastics and products. A team of researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation Center for Sustainable Polymers based at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have developed a chemical technology of combined fermentation and chemical refining that can produce petroleum-like liquids from renewable plants. These renewable liquids could serve as a more sustainable replacement for today’s fossil fuels used to make everyday products like plastic containers and bags, automobile parts, lubricants, and soaps. The new…
– using an antiferromagnet for solid devices. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany, together with collaborators at the Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati, have discovered, for the first time, a giant thermoelectric effect in an antiferromagnet. The study published in Nature Materials in a paper entitled “Giant anomalous Nernst signal in the antiferromagnet YbMnBi2” shows, surprisingly, that antiferromagnets can have the same value of the anomalous Nernst effect as…
New approach solves a persistent problem of intermittency that has hindered use of the tiny light emitters for biological imaging or quantum photonics. Quantum dots, discovered in the 1990s, have a wide range of applications and are perhaps best known for producing vivid colors in some high-end televisions. But for some potential uses, such as tracking biochemical pathways of a drug as it interacts with living cells, progress has been hampered by one seemingly uncontrollable characteristic: a tendency to blink…
The Earlham Institute (EI) has boosted its capability in high-fidelity long-read sequencing with a twin set of the cutting-edge Pacific Biosciences Sequel IIe platforms to support the Earth BioGenome projects, providing the UK bioscience community with critical technologies for biodiversity genomics. As the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is gaining momentum to sequence, catalogue, and characterise the genomes of all eukaryotic biodiversity on Earth within the next ten years, global efforts are under way to deploy the technology and infrastructure capable…
Göttingen Scientists of the Cluster of Excellence Multiscale Bioimaging (MBExC) and the Collaborative Research Center 1190 develop novel strategy to investigate gene expression in mitochondria. Published in “Cell”. Mitochondria are considered the power plants of cells because they generate energy from our food with the help of oxygen. The machinery required for this is called the respiratory chain. Its central building blocks are formed by mitochondria themselves through the expression of genes of their own genetic material. Malfunctions in gene…
… is latest use of new strategy against diseases. Using the same approach they recently used to create effective vaccine candidates against COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), scientists are tackling another virus: the tick-borne Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF). It causes death in up to 40% of cases, and the World Health Organization identified the disease as one of its top priorities for research and development. The results appear today in the journal Science. Using what scientists refer to as…
Since its invention over 400 years ago, the microscope has continued to evolve, peering ever deeper into nature’s mysteries at the smallest scales. In new research, Prof. Shaopeng Wang, his postdoctoral research scholar Guangzhong Ma along with their colleagues at the Biodesign Center for Bioelectronics and Biosensors at Arizona State University describe advances in microscopy based on a phenomenon known as surface plasmon resonance (SPR). The new study highlights a series of experiments that show how SPR technology can be used to precisely image 100…
The intestine is essential for maintaining our energy balance and is a master at reacting quickly to changes in nutrition and nutrient balance. It manages to do this with the help of intestinal cells that among other things are specialized in the absorption of food components or the secretion of hormones. In adult humans, the intestinal cells regenerate every five to seven days. The ability to constantly renew and develop all types of intestinal cells from intestinal stem cells is…
First microfluidic organ-on-a-chip model of the disease could help bring much needed drugs, and personalized medicine approaches to patients. The inherited progressive disorder cystic fibrosis (CF) causes severe damage to the lungs, and other tissues in the body by affecting the cells that produce mucus, sweat, and digestive juices. In individuals carrying mutations in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene, which encodes an ion channel controlling the flow of ions and water in and out of cells, the…
Fear is essential for survival, but must be well regulated to avoid harmful behaviors such as panic attacks or exaggerated risk taking. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have now demonstrated in mice that the brain relies on the body’s feedback to regulate fear. The brain’s insular cortex strongly reacts to stimuli signaling danger. However, when the body freezes in response to fear, the heartbeat slows down leading to attenuated insular cortex activity. Processing these opposing signals helps…
… discovered at University of Notre Dame. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame discovered a new type of cell in the heart that may help regulate heart rate, and could be an important key in understanding certain types of congenital heart defects and other diseases that involve the heart. The cells, which were termed nexus glia, resemble critical glial cells called astrocytes in the brain, according to research completed in the lab of Cody Smith, the Elizabeth and Michael Gallagher…
Single-atom dimer electrocatalyst for green hydrogen production. The limited reservoir of fossils fuels and the ever-increasing threats of climate change have encouraged researchers to develop alternative technologies to produce eco-friendly fuels. Green hydrogen generated from the electrolysis of water using renewable electricity is considered a next-generation renewable energy source for the future. But in reality, the overwhelming majority of hydrogen fuel is obtained from the refining of fossils fuels due to the high cost of electrolysis. Currently, the efficiency of…
Research led by UT Southwestern and the University of Washington could lead to a wealth of drug targets. UT Southwestern and University of Washington researchers led an international team that used artificial intelligence (AI) and evolutionary analysis to produce 3D models of eukaryotic protein interactions. The study, published in Science, identified more than 100 probable protein complexes for the first time and provided structural models for more than 700 previously uncharacterized ones. Insights into the ways pairs or groups of proteins fit…
Max Planck Institute’s researchers highlight the mechanism that enhances toxicity of pathogens in the human cell. For the first time, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, Germany, in collaboration with the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, have discovered how the structure of the toxin becomes more ordered when interacting with actin, one of the main components of the cytoskeleton. It appears that the docking of ExoY to actin induces a stabilisation downhill at the toxin…
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