Lifeboat Foundation

The question of how precisely protons move through water in an electric field has fascinated scientists for centuries. Now, more than 200 years after the last major insight into the phenomenon, scientists have some clarity.

In 1,806, Theodor Grotthuss put forward a hypothesis, which came to be known as the Grotthuss mechanism for ‘proton jumping’, about how a charge might flow through a solution of water.

While Grotthuss’s hypothesis was very forward-thinking for its time – coming before protons, or even the actual structure of water, were even known about – modern-day researchers have long known that it didn’t provide a complete understanding of what happened at a molecular level.

Summary: Administering a chemical compound called synthetic retinoids to the retina helped restore brain networks associated with vision and prompted the growth of two times more neurons, effectively restoring vision in adult mouse models of the genetic visual disorder LCA.

Source: UC Irvine.

A discovery about how some visually impaired adults could start to see offers a new vision of the brain’s possibilities.

Antibiotics are standard treatments for fighting dangerous bacterial infections. Yet the number of bacteria developing a resistance to antibiotics is increasing. Researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of São Paulo are overcoming this resistance with light.

The researchers tailored antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT)—a chemical reaction triggered by visible light—for use on antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains. Results showed the treatment weakened bacteria to where low doses of current antibiotics could effectively eliminate them.

“Using aPDT in combination with antibiotics creates a synergy of interaction working together for a solution,” said Vladislav Yakovlev, University Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M and co-director of the project. “It’s a step in the right direction against resistant bacteria.”

A team of researchers at Northwestern University has devised a new platform for gene editing that could inform the future application of a near-limitless library of CRISPR-based therapeutics.

Using chemical design and synthesis, the team brought together the Nobel-prize winning technology with therapeutic technology born in their own lab to overcome a critical limitation of CRISPR. Specifically, the groundbreaking work provides a system to deliver the cargo required for generating the gene editing machine known as CRISPR-Cas9. The team developed a way to transform the Cas-9 protein into a spherical nucleic acid (SNA) and load it with critical components as required to access a broad range of tissue and cell types, as well as the intracellular compartments required for gene editing.

The research, published today in a paper titled, “CRISPR Spherical Nucleic Acids,” in the publication Journal of the American Chemical Society, and shows how CRISPR SNAs can be delivered across the cell membrane and into the nucleus while also retaining bioactivity and gene editing capabilities.

Stanford University researchers have discovered a rapid and sustainable way to synthetically produce a promising cancer-fighting compound right in the lab. The compound’s availability has been limited because its only currently known natural source is a single plant species that grows solely in a small rainforest region of Northeastern Australia.

The compound, designated EBC-46 and technically called tigilanol tiglate, works by promoting a localized immune response against tumors. The response breaks apart the tumor’s blood vessels and ultimately kills its cancerous cells. EBC-46 recently entered into human clinical trials following its extremely high success rate in treating a kind of cancer in dogs.

Given its complex structure, however, EBC-46 had appeared synthetically inaccessible, meaning no plausible path seemed to exist for producing it practically in a laboratory. However, thanks to a clever process, the Stanford researchers demonstrated for the first time how to chemically transform an abundant, plant-based starting material into EBC-46.

An upcycling method changes the most widely produced plastic into the second most widely produced plastic, making it more sustainable.

A new technique has been developed by scientists that transforms polyethylene (PE), the most widely produced plastic, into polypropylene (PP), the second most produced plastic.

Upcycling plastic efficiently to eliminate waste

Continue reading “A new process can make plastics more environmentally friendly” »

The complexity of life on Earth was derived from simplicity: From the first protocells to the growth of any organism, individual cells aggregate into basic clumps and then form more complex structures. The earliest cells lacked complicated biochemical machinery; to evolve into multicellular organisms, simple mechanisms were necessary to produce chemical signals that prompted the cells to both move and form colonies.

Replicating this behavior in synthetic systems is necessary to advance fields such as soft robotics. Chemical engineering researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering have established this feat in their latest advancement in biomimicry.

Continue reading “Utilizing chemo-mechanical oscillations to mimic protocell behavior in manufactured microcapsules” »

Thanks to new RNA vaccines, we humans have been able to protect ourselves incredibly quickly from new viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These vaccines insert a piece of ephemeral genetic material into the body’s cells, which then read its code and churn out a specific protein—in this case, telltale “spikes” that stud the outside of the coronavirus—priming the immune system to fight future invaders.

The technique is effective, and has promise for all sorts of therapies, says Eerik Kaseniit, Ph.D. student in bioengineering at Stanford. At the moment, though, these sorts of RNA therapies can’t focus on specific cells. Once injected into the body, they indiscriminately make the encoded protein in every cell they enter. If you want to use them to treat only one kind of cell—like those inside a cancerous tumor—you’ll need something more precise.

Kaseniit and his advisor, assistant professor of chemical engineering Xiaojing Gao, may have found a way to make this possible. They’ve created a new tool called an RNA “sensor”—a strand of lab-made RNA that reveals its contents only when it enters particular tissues within the body. The method is so exact that it can home in on both cell types and cell states, activating only when its target cell is creating a certain RNA, says Gao. The pair published their findings Oct. 5 in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Although just cute little creatures at first glance, the microscopic geckos and octopuses fabricated by 3D laser printing in the molecular engineering labs at Heidelberg University could open up new opportunities in fields such as microrobotics or biomedicine.

The printed microstructures are made from novel materials —known as smart polymers—whose size and mechanical properties can be tuned on demand and with high precision. These “life-like” 3D microstructures were developed in the framework of the “3D Matter Made to Order” (3DMM2O) Cluster of Excellence, a collaboration between Ruperto Carola and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

“Manufacturing programmable materials whose mechanical properties can be adapted on demand is highly desired for many applications,” states Junior Professor Dr. Eva Blasco, group leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and the Institute for Molecular Systems Engineering and Advanced Materials of Heidelberg University.