In numerous scientific fields, high-throughput experimentation methods combined with artificial intelligence (AI) show great promise to accelerate innovation and scientific discovery.
Case in point: In just five months, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory used robotics, automation and AI to conduct more than 6,000 experiments on chemicals in a type of rechargeable energy storage called organic redox flow batteries (RFBs). Such a monumental effort would have taken five to eight years with traditional experimentation.
Organic RFBs use carbon-based—that is, organic—molecules instead of traditional metal ions. Through their work, the researchers made a crucial finding about these batteries: A fundamental barrier at the molecular level limits their stability. The insight is expected to inspire exciting new directions in battery chemical research.
How cells eliminate inefficient ribosomes.
Inside every cell, ribosomes act as tiny but vital factories that build proteins, translating genetic information into the molecules that sustain life. Although ribosomes share the same basic structure, not all of them work with equal precision. Until now, scientists did not fully understand how cells detect and handle ribosomes that underperform.
Addressing this question, a team of researchers has identified a quality control mechanism that ensures only the most competent ribosomes survive. Their study, published in Nature Communications shows that ribosomes compete during protein synthesis. When translation is disrupted, the less efficient ribosomes are selectively broken down, while the stronger ones continue functioning.
Using biochemical and genetic analyses in yeast, the researchers examined how ribosomes behave when translation is disrupted. The team engineered cells to contain a functional but suboptimal ribosome variant. These slower-moving ribosomes are overtaken on messenger RNA by faster, native ribosomes, causing the two types to collide. Such ribosome-ribosome collisions activate a ubiquitination-dependent quality control pathway that selectively removes the less efficient ribosomes.
The team also explored how external factors, such as the anticancer drug cisplatin affect this process. Cisplatin, known for binding to RNA and DNA, was found to increase ribosome collisions, which in turn promoted ribosome degradation. This insight could improve understanding of how the drug acts inside cells and why it sometimes causes side effects.
The implications of this discovery extend beyond basic biology. By showing how cells maintain the quality of their protein factories, the study provides a foundation for understanding disorders caused by ribosome malfunction, known as ribosomopathies. It may also open the door to new approaches for improving the safety and effectiveness of certain drugs.
Our nearest neighbor, the moon, is still something of a mystery to us. For decades, scientists have wondered why it appears so lopsided, with dark volcanic plains on the near side (the side we see) and rugged, cratered mountains and a thicker crust on the far side. Now we might be closer to knowing why.
Analysis of lunar soil and rock brought back from the far side by China’s Chang’e-6 mission suggests that a massive impact long ago changed the moon’s interior.
The samples were collected from the South Pole-Aitken basin, a massive impact crater covering nearly one-quarter of the moon’s surface. Because it is so deep, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences wanted to see whether the impact had reached the moon’s mantle and changed its chemistry.
Guanidine is an organic compound primarily used as a denaturing reagent to disrupt the structures of proteins and nucleic acids. Together with partner institutions, scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have demonstrated that cyanobacteria, which play a central role in global biogeochemical cycles, use guanidine as a nitrogen source.
The results were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers shed light on the underlying mechanisms and the potential for a new tool for sustainable biotechnological applications.
Enzymes are the molecular machines that power life; they build and break down molecules, copy DNA, digest food, and drive virtually every chemical reaction in our cells. For decades, scientists have designed drugs to slow down or block enzymes, stopping infections or the growth of cancer by jamming these tiny machines. But what if tackling some diseases requires the opposite approach?
Speeding enzymes up, it turns out, is much harder than stopping them. Tarun Kapoor is the Pels Family Professor in Rockefeller’s Selma and Lawrence Ruben Laboratory of Chemistry and Cell Biology. Recently, he has shifted the focus of this lab to tackle the tricky question of how to make enzymes work faster.
Already, his lab has developed a chemical compound to speed up an enzyme that works too slowly in people with a rare form of neurodegeneration. The same approach could open new treatment possibilities for many other diseases where other enzymes have lost function, including some cancers and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s.
Perseverance confirmed a long-suspected phenomenon in which electrical discharges and their associated shock waves can be born within Red Planet mini-twisters.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has recorded the sounds of electrical discharges —sparks — and mini-sonic booms in dust devils on Mars. Long theorized, the phenomenon has now been confirmed through audio and electromagnetic recordings captured by the rover’s SuperCam microphone. The discovery, published Nov. 26 in the journal Nature, has implications for Martian atmospheric chemistry, climate, and habitability, and could help inform the design of future robotic and human missions to Mars.
A frequent occurrence on the Red Planet, dust devils form from rising and rotating columns of warm air. Air near the planet’s surface becomes heated by contact with the warmer ground and rises through the denser, cooler air above. As other air moves along the surface to take the place of the rising warmer air, it begins to rotate. When the incoming air rises into the column, it picks up speed like spinning ice skaters bringing their arms closer to their body. The air rushing in also picks up dust, and a dust devil is born.
Whether they are laundry detergents, mascara, or Christmas chocolate, many everyday products contain fatty acids from palm oil or coconut oil. However, the extraction of these raw materials is associated with massive environmental issues: Rainforests are cleared, habitats for endangered species are destroyed, and traditional farmers lose their livelihoods.
A research team led by Prof. Martin Grininger at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, has now developed a biotechnological approach that could enable a more environmentally friendly production method. The team’s work appears in Nature Chemical Biology.
A collaboration between Stuart Parkin’s group at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle (Saale) and Claudia Felser’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden has realized a fundamentally new way to control quantum particles in solids. Writing in Nature, the researchers report the experimental demonstration of a chiral fermionic valve—a device that spatially separates quantum particles of opposite chirality using quantum geometry alone, without magnetic fields or magnetic materials.
The work was driven by Anvesh Dixit, a Ph.D. student in Parkin’s group in Halle, and the first author of the study, who designed, fabricated, and measured the mesoscopic devices that made the discovery possible.
“This project was only possible because we could combine materials with exceptional topological quality and transport experiments at the mesoscopic quantum limit,” says Anvesh Dixit. “Seeing chiral fermions separate and interfere purely due to quantum geometry is truly exciting.”
Organs often have fluid-filled spaces called lumens, which are crucial for organ function and serve as transport and delivery networks. Lumens in the pancreas form a complex ductal system, and its channels transport digestive enzymes to the small intestine. Understanding how this system forms in embryonic development is essential, both for normal organ formation and for diagnosing and treating pancreatic disorders. Despite their importance, how lumens take certain shapes is not fully understood, as studies in other models have largely been limited to the formation of single, spherical lumens. Organoid models, which more closely mimic the physiological characteristics of real organs, can exhibit a range of lumen morphologies, such as complex networks of thin tubes.
Researchers in the group of Anne Grapin-Botton, director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, and also Honorary Professor at TU Dresden, teamed up with colleagues from the group of Masaki Sano at the University of Tokyo (Japan), Tetsuya Hiraiwa at the Institute of Physics of Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and with Daniel Rivéline at the Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire (France) to explore the processes involved in complex lumen formation. Working with a combination of computational modeling and experimental techniques, the scientists were able to identify the crucial factors that control lumen shape.
Three-dimensional pancreatic structures, also called pancreatic organoids, can form either large spherical lumen or narrow complex interconnected lumen structures, depending on the medium in the dish. By adding specific chemical drugs altering cell proliferation rate and pressure in the lumen, we were able to change lumen shape. We also found that making the epithelial cells surrounding the lumen more permeable reduces pressure and can change the shape of the lumen as well.