Researchers at the University of Bonn have developed a molecular structure that can cover graphite surfaces with a sea of tiny flagged “flagpoles”. The properties of this coating are highly variable. It may provide a basis for the development of new catalysts. The compounds could also be suitable for measuring the nanomechanical properties of proteins. The results were published online in advance in the journal “Angewandte Chemie”. Now the print edition has been published, which shows a part of the…

Malaria is one of the most dangerous infectious diseases. The causative pathogens are microorganisms of the genus Plasmodium. A particularly dangerous form of the disease is caused by Plasmodium falciparum. Artemisinin is one of the most important antimalarial drugs against this parasite. However, in a mutant of the pathogen that is now spreading, the effect of artemisinin is limited. A team of researchers around Robin Schumann, a biochemist from Kaiserslautern, has now found the mechanism behind this: A protein that…

Research in Guy Genin’s lab finds new features of attachment system and serves as model for merging materials. Engineers often use nature to inspire new materials and designs. A discovery by a multi-institutional team of researchers and engineers about how tendon and bone attach in the shoulder joint has uncovered previously unsuspected engineering strategies for attaching dissimilar materials. The discovery also sheds new light on how the rotator cuff functions and on why rotator cuff repairs fail so frequently. Guy…

Plant research: publication in the Plant Biotechnology Journal For plant breeding, it is important to create as many combinations as possible of genetic variants within a short time to select the most suitable candidates between plants with many different characteristics. The working group of Prof. Dr. Benjamin Stich from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has now developed a method for using natural variations to identify what are referred to as ‘highly recombinogenic individuals’. They have presented their method, which has…

The mechanisms governing the light-sensitive activities of phytochrome, a bacterial protein, have been clarified at atomic scale resolution, opening the door to understanding black rot disease, as well as to regulating other bacterial pathogenicities. Black rot disease in cabbages, radishes and related cruciferous crops may have disastrous consequences for the yield and production of marketable plants. The bacterium Xanthomonas campestris is the major cause of black rot disease, which works by retarding several light-mediated biological processes. Behind this biological retardation…

Researchers in Japan have designed the first bottom-up designed peptides, comprising chains of amino acids, that can form artificial nanopores to identify and enable single molecule-sorting of genetic material in a lipid membrane. Biological nanopores are generally channels made by pore-forming proteins, that can detect specific molecules, but such natural channels are difficult to identify, limiting proposed applications in low-cost, speedy DNA sequencing, small molecule detection and more. “Nanopore sensing is a powerful tool for label-free, single-molecule detection,” said corresponding…

Aspergillus fumigatus is a fungus that is widespread in the environment and causes life-threatening infections in humans. An international team of researchers has now taken a closer look at the pathogen’s great genetic diversity. Serious fungal infections The fungus Aspergillus fumigatus causes severe infections in more than 300,000 people worldwide every year. These infections are particularly problematic in immunocompromised patients with a fatality rate up to 50 %. Treatment of these diseases relies on triazole antimycotics. However, resistance to these…

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…

A new “image analysis pipeline” is giving scientists rapid new insight into how disease or injury have changed the body, down to the individual cell. It’s called TDAExplore, which takes the detailed imaging provided by microscopy, pairs it with a hot area of mathematics called topology, which provides insight on how things are arranged, and the analytical power of artificial intelligence to give, for example, a new perspective on changes in a cell resulting from ALS and where in the…

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…

Special GSI expertise… Which are the best applications for tumor therapy with charged particles to realize its great potential for the future? In which cases can it be used most effectively? These aspects belong to the most exciting questions in radiation biology and medical physics. A group of top-class experts now evaluated and summarized the state-of-the-art of heavy ion radiotherapy and presented a review article in the world-renowned online journal “Nature Reviews”. Main author of the text with the title…

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…