Lifeboat Foundation

When Dr. Shiran Barber-Zucker joined the lab of Prof. Sarel Fleishman as a postdoctoral fellow, she chose to pursue an environmental dream: breaking down plastic waste into useful chemicals. Nature has clever ways of decomposing tough materials: Dead trees, for example, are recycled by white-rot fungi, whose enzymes degrade wood into nutrients that return to the soil. So why not coax the same enzymes into degrading man-made waste?

Barber-Zucker’s problem was that these enzymes, called versatile peroxidases, are notoriously unstable. “These natural enzymes are real prima donnas; they are extremely difficult to work with,” says Fleishman, of the Biomolecular Sciences Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Over the past few years, his lab has developed computational methods that are being used by thousands of research teams around the world to design enzymes and other proteins with enhanced stability and additional desired properties. For such methods to be applied, however, a protein’s precise molecular structure must be known. This typically means that the protein must be sufficiently stable to form crystals, which can be bombarded with X-rays to reveal their structure in 3D. This structure is then tweaked using the lab’s algorithms to design an improved protein that doesn’t exist in nature.

Circa 2015

Researchers have taken a regular gel pen and turned it into a DIY chemical sensor.

Summary: Researchers identified a genetic correlation between blood biomarkers and a range of mental health disorders. The study provides evidence some substance measures within the blood may be involved in the cause of mental illnesses. For example, immune system proteins may be involved in the development of depression, schizophrenia, and anorexia.

Source: The Conversation.

Mental health disorders including depression, schizophrenia, and anorexia show links to biological markers detected in routine blood tests, according to our new study of genetic, biochemical and psychiatric data from almost a million people.

Milling rice to separate the grain from the husks produces about 100 million tons of rice husk waste globally each year. Scientists searching for a scalable method to fabricate quantum dots have developed a way to recycle rice husks to create the first silicon quantum dot (QD) LED light. Their new method transforms agricultural waste into state-of-the-art light-emitting diodes in a low-cost, environmentally friendly way.

The research team from the Natural Science Center for Basic Research and Development, Hiroshima University, published their findings on January 28, 2022, in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

“Since typical QDs often involve toxic material, such as cadmium, lead, or other heavy metals, environmental concerns have been frequently deliberated when using nanomaterials. Our proposed process and fabrication method for QDs minimizes these concerns,” said Ken-ichi Saitow, lead study author and a professor of chemistry at Hiroshima University.

Despite being widely used in numerous catalytic applications, our understanding of reactive surface sites of high-surface-area γ-Al2O3 remains limited to date. Recent contributions have pointed toward the potential role of highly reactive edge sites contained in the high-field signal (−0.5 to 0 ppm) of the 1H NMR spectrum of γ-Al2O3 materials. This work combines the development of well-defined, needle-shaped γ-Al2O3 nanocrystals having a high relative fraction of edge sites with the use of state-of-the-art solid-state NMR to significantly deepen our understanding of this specific signal. We are able to resolve two hydroxyl sites with distinct isotropic chemical shifts of −0.2 and −0.4 ppm and different positions within the dipole–dipole network from 1H–1H single-quantum double-quantum NMR.

Chemical biology professor, Suyang Xu, works to crack the secrets of new states of matter.

Throughout human history, most of our efforts to store information, from knots and oracle bones to bamboo markings and the written word, boil down to two techniques: using characters or shapes to represent information. Today, huge amounts of information are stored on silicon wafers with zeros and ones, but a new material at the border of quantum chemistry and quantum physics could enable vast improvements in storage.

Continue reading “This scientist is unlocking the potential of quantum technologies. Here’s how” »

A new supplement that stimulates a natural body process also promotes muscle recovery in humans. New research indicates that urolithin A can play an important role in improving muscles and prolonging activity – this is especially important as muscles decline with age, exposing us to the dangers of frailty.

Longevity. Technology sponsored content: As fast as we are unlocking the secrets of urolithin A we are also discovering obstacles. Urolithin A boosts mitochondrial and muscle function for sure, but it’s a metabolite, meaning it is made by the body from raw materials that we get from fruits, especially pomegranates; however, not everyone can make sufficient quantities of this antiaging molecule, and that’s where Mitopure steps in.

It seems to be universally accepted that the older we get, the more easily we get tired and the less energy we have – but perhaps it doesn’t have to be this way. The secret lies in our mitochondria, tiny organelles that pack a mighty punch when it comes to energy production. These minute powerhouses take oxygen and glucose and create a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and this is the energy our bodies use for movement, growth and repair.

We produce more than 380 million tonnes of plastic every year, with over 8 million tons of plastic waste escaping into our oceans. Scientists have come up with a creative solution to address this growing plastic problem, and the best thing is that their solution smells and tastes divine.

By getting help from a genetically modified bacteria, a team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh was able to turn plastic bottles into vanilla flavoring. This is the first time a valuable chemical has been achieved from plastic waste.

The study, published in the journal Green Chemistry, explains how bacteria may be used to transform plastic into vanillin, a compound that is used not just in food, but also in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

Chemical engineers and materials scientists are continuously looking for the following groundbreaking material, chemical, or medication. The emergence of machine-learning technologies has accelerated the discovery process, which may typically take years. Ideally, the objective is to train a machine-learning model on a few known chemical samples and then let it build as many manufacturable molecules of the same class with predictable physical attributes as feasible. You can develop new molecules with ideal characteristics if you have all of these components and the know-how to synthesize them.

However, current approaches need large datasets for training models. Many class-specific chemical databases only contain a few example compounds, restricting their capacity to generalize and construct biological molecules that might be generated in the real world.

This issue was addressed by a team of researchers from MIT and IBM by employing a generative graph model to create new synthesizable compounds within the same training data’s chemical class. The research was presented in a research paper. They model the production of atoms and chemical bonds as a graph and create a graph grammar — a linguistic analog of systems and structures for word ordering — that provides a set of rules for constructing compounds like monomers and polymers.