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A new publication in the May issue of Nature Aging by researchers from Integrated Biosciences, a biotechnology company combining synthetic biology and machine learning to target aging, demonstrates the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to discover novel senolytic compounds, a class of small molecules under intense study for their ability to suppress age-related processes such as fibrosis, inflammation and cancer.

The paper, “Discovering small-molecule senolytics with deep neural networks,” authored in collaboration with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, describes the AI-guided screening of more than 800,000 compounds to reveal three drug candidates with comparable efficacy and superior medicinal chemistry properties than those of senolytics currently under investigation.

“This research result is a significant milestone for both longevity research and the application of artificial intelligence to drug discovery,” said Felix Wong, Ph.D., co-founder of Integrated Biosciences and first author of the publication. “These data demonstrate that we can explore chemical space in silico and emerge with multiple candidate anti-aging compounds that are more likely to succeed in the clinic, compared to even the most promising examples of their kind being studied today.”

Out of all common refrains in the world of computing, the phrase “if only software would catch up with hardware” would probably rank pretty high. And yet, software does sometimes catch up with hardware. In fact, it seems that this time, software can go as far as unlocking quantum computations for classical computers. That’s according to researchers with the RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing, Japan, who have published work on an algorithm that significantly accelerates a specific quantum computing workload. More significantly, the workload itself — called time evolution operators — has applications in condensed matter physics and quantum chemistry, two fields that can unlock new worlds within our own.

Normally, an improved algorithm wouldn’t be completely out of the ordinary; updates are everywhere, after all. Every app update, software update, or firmware upgrade is essentially bringing revised code that either solves problems or improves performance (hopefully). And improved algorithms are nice, as anyone with a graphics card from either AMD or NVIDIA can attest. But let’s face it: We’re used to being disappointed with performance updates.

Every skin flake, hair follicle, eyelash, and spit drop cast from your body contains instructions written in a chemical code, one that is unique to you.

According to a new study, technology has advanced to the point that it’s now possible to sift scraps of human DNA out of the air, water, or soil and decipher personal details about the individuals who dropped them.

As useful as this might seem, the study’s authors warn society might not be prepared for the consequences.

A novel protocol for quantum computers could reproduce the complex dynamics of quantum materials.

RIKEN researchers have created a hybrid quantum-computational algorithm that can efficiently calculate atomic-level interactions in complex materials. This innovation enables the use of smaller quantum computers or conventional ones to study condensed-matter physics and quantum chemistry, paving the way for new discoveries in these fields.

A quantum-computational algorithm that could be used to efficiently and accurately calculate atomic-level interactions in complex materials has been developed by RIKEN researchers. It has the potential to bring an unprecedented level of understanding to condensed-matter physics and quantum chemistry—an application of quantum computers first proposed by the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman in 1981.

A team of engineers and materials scientists affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S., has developed a new way to depolymerize plastics using electrified spatiotemporal heating. In their paper, published in the journal Nature, the group describes the new process and its efficiency. Nature has also published a Research Briefing in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team.

Over the past several years, plastic pollution has become a major concern, both for the environment and for the health of plants and animals, including humans, and scientists are seeking ways to recycle it. Most of the techniques developed thus far involve using chemicals to depolymerize plastics. These efforts are still extremely inefficient, however, with yields between 10% and 25%. In this new effort, the team has found a way to use pulsed electricity to boost the yield to approximately 36%.

The approach involved designing a new kind of reactor with a porous carbon felt bilayer and a pulsed electric heater at the top. In their reactor, plastic bits are melted as they are fed in to the upper chamber and flow as a mass into a lower chamber, where the material is pushed through the felt filter. The plastic then begins to decompose as the temperature rises. As the molecules that make up the plastic become smaller, their volatility grows until they are expelled from the reactor as a gas, which allows more liquid to be drawn in. Using electricity to heat the plastic allows for oscillating the temperature, allowing simpler depolymerization reactions to take precedence over side reactions, which need additional heating to depolymerize.

DNA writing is an aspect of our industry that I’ve been closely watching for several years because it is a critical component of so many groundbreaking capabilities, from cell and gene therapies to DNA data storage. At the SynBioBeta Conference in 2018, the co-founder of a new startup that was barely more than an idea gave a lightning talk on enzymatic DNA synthesis — and I was so struck by the technology the company was aiming to develop that I listed them as one of four synthetic biology startups to watch in 2019. I watched them, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Ansa Biotechnologies, Inc. — the Emeryville, California-based DNA synthesis startup using enzymes instead of chemicals to write DNA — announced in March the successful de novo synthesis of a 1005-mer, the world’s longest synthetic oligonucleotide, encoding a key part of the AAV vector used for developing gene therapies. And that’s just the beginning. Co-founder Dan Lin-Arlow will be giving another lightning talk at this year’s SynBioBeta Conference in just a few weeks. I caught up with him in the lead up and was truly impressed by what Ansa Biotechnologies has accomplished in just 5 years.

Synthetic DNA is a key enabling technology for engineering biology. For nearly 40 years, synthetic DNA has been produced using phosphoramidite chemistry, which facilitates the sequential addition of new bases to a DNA chain in a simple cyclic reaction. While this process is incredibly efficient and has supported countless innovative breakthroughs (a visit to Twist Bioscience’s website will quickly educate you on exciting advances in drug discovery, infectious disease research, cancer therapeutics, and even agriculture enabled by synthetic DNA) it suffers from two main drawbacks: its reliance on harsh chemicals and its inability to produce long (read: complex) DNA fragments.

Ocean microplastics have become a major source of concern, especially since they are so hard to track down, but researchers found an ingenious solution using satellites.

Ocean plastics have become a major source of concern for evironmental conservationists and public health professionals in recent years, and there hasn’t been a good way to track how these plastics are moving or their concentrations. But now, researchers from the University of Michigan have developed an ingenious way to track the ebb and flow of these microplastics around the world thanks to NASA satellites.

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The early detection and treatment of dementia such as Alzheimer’s is still one of the great challenges of modern medicine. It is already known that certain proteins in the cerebrospinal fluid can be used to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. However, the current detection methods for such biomarkers by means of biochemical tests can only confirm and quantify the presence of such pathological proteins. No conclusions can be drawn about their original morphology of the proteins using biochemical assays, which holds information on disease stages.

However, such information if obtained directly in a label-free manner could allow conclusions to be drawn about the stage of the disease and evaluate the efficiency of a prescribed treatment. A team from the Transport at Nanoscale Interfaces Laboratory at Empa and the Department of Neurology at the Cantonal Hospital in St. Gallen has now used atomic force microscopy (AFM) to visualize the proteins that are indicative of Alzheimer’s disease under conditions that are as close to reality as possible. The researchers recently published their results in the journal Communications Biology.

With the new study, the researchers add another piece of the puzzle to their insights into Alzheimer’s development and diagnosis.

An unusual quasicrystal has been discovered by a team from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the University of Sheffield and Xi’an Jiaotong University. It has a dodecagonal honeycomb structure that has never been seen before. Until now, similar quasicrystals were only known to come in a solid—not liquid—form. The team presents its results in the journal Nature Chemistry.

Quasicrystals have a special structure. They have a regular pattern similar to normal crystals, however, in normal crystals, the arrangement of the individual components is repeated over and over at regular intervals. In the case of quasicrystals, the components do not fit together in such a periodic pattern. This special structure gives them special properties that normal crystals do not have.

The newly discovered quasicrystal consists of dodecagons, which in turn are made up of a mixture of triangular, square and, for the first time, trapezoidal shaped cells. These are generated from the self-assembly of “T-shaped” molecules. “We have discovered a perfectly ordered liquid quasicrystal. Such a material has never been seen before,” says chemist Professor Carsten Tschierske at MLU.