Lifeboat Foundation

Small but mighty, lysosomes play a surprisingly important role in cells despite their diminutive size. Making up only 1–3% of the cell by volume, these small sacs are the cell’s recycling centers, home to enzymes that break down unneeded molecules into small pieces that can then be reassembled to form new ones. Lysosomal dysfunction can lead to a variety of neurodegenerative or other diseases, but without ways to better study the inner contents of lysosomes, the exact molecules involved in diseases—and therefore new drugs to target them—remain elusive.

A new method, reported in Nature on Sept. 21, allows scientists to determine all the molecules present in the lysosomes of any cell in mice. Studying the contents of these molecular recycling centers could help researchers learn how the improper degradation of cellular materials leads to certain diseases. Led by Stanford University’s Monther Abu-Remaileh, institute scholar at Sarafan ChEM-H, the study’s team also learned more about the cause for a currently untreatable neurodegenerative disease known as Batten disease, information that could lead to new therapies.

“Lysosomes are fascinating both fundamentally and clinically: they supply the rest of the cell with nutrients, but we don’t always know how and when they supply them, and they are the places where many diseases, especially those that affect the brain, start,” said Abu-Remaileh, who is an assistant professor of chemical engineering and of genetics.

Maximizing Benefits Of The Life Sciences & Health Tech For All Americans — Dr. Andrew Hebbeler, Ph.D., Principal Assistant Director for Health and Life Sciences, Office of Science and Technology Policy, The White House.

Dr. Andrew Hebbeler, Ph.D., is Principal Assistant Director for Health and Life Sciences, Office of Science and Technology Policy at The White House (https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ostps-teams/health-and-life-sciences/), and has extensive foreign affairs, national security, global health, and science and technology (S&T) policy experience.

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Recovery of the Antarctic ozone layer is anticipated to take place sometime around 2070.

The depletion of the ozone layer had a huge impact on humanity for a while. Moreover, the United Nations accepted The International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer in 1994.

Every living thing on Earth is shielded from UV radiation by the stratospheric ozone layer. Thus, the Ozone Layer is vital for all forms of life, and we need to protect it without a doubt.

The genetic encoding of ncAAs with distinct chemical, biological, and physical properties requires the engineering of bioorthogonal translational machinery, consisting of an evolved aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA pair and a “blank” codon. To achieve this, the researchers mimicked the ibis’ ability to synthesize sTyr and incorporate it into proteins.

The Xiao lab employed a mutant amber stop codon to encode the desired sulfotransferase, resulting in a completely autonomous mammalian cell line capable of biosynthesizing sTyr and incorporating it with great precision into proteins.

These engineered cells, the authors wrote, can produce “site-specifically sulfated proteins at a higher yield than cells fed exogenously with the highest level of sTyr reported in the literature.” They used the cells to prepare highly potent thrombin inhibitors with site-specific sulfation.

The word “intriguing” is being used to describe Perseverance results coming from sedimentary rocks on Mars that are of the same type known for preserving fossils and evidence of life here on Earth.

When NASA landed the Perseverance rover on Mars complete with an instrument package capable of identifying organic molecules, the Agency chose the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient water-formed delta dating back 3.5 billion Earth years. The goal was to look for signs of ancient Martians, not the Martians of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” but rather microorganisms like the ones that killed off the Martians after they arrived.

Onboard Perseverance is an instrumentation package that goes by the acronym SHERLOC which stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals. Using SHERLOC, Perseverance has been sampling sedimentary rocks laid down by the water that flowed on the Martian surface earlier in its history.

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Recent advancements in the development of machine learning and optimization techniques have opened new and exciting possibilities for identifying suitable molecular designs, compounds, and chemical candidates for different applications. Optimization techniques, some of which are based on machine learning algorithms, are powerful tools that can be used to select optimal solutions for a given problem among a typically large set of possibilities.

Researchers at Colorado State University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have been applying state-of-the-art molecular optimization models to different real-world problems that entail identifying new and promising molecular designs. In their most recent study, featured in Nature Machine Intelligence, they specifically applied a newly developed, open-source optimization framework to the task of identifying viable organic radicals for aqueous redox flow batteries, energy devices that convert chemical energy into electricity.

“Our project was funded by an ARPA-E program that was looking to shorten how long it takes to develop new energy materials using machine learning techniques,” Peter C. St. John, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Finding new candidates for redox flow batteries was an interesting extension of some of our previous work, including a paper published in Nature Communications and another in Scientific Data, both looking at organic radicals.”

The research community is excited about the potential of DNA to function as long-term archival storage. That’s largely because it’s extremely dense, chemically stable for tens of thousands of years, and comes in a format we’re unlikely to forget how to read. While there has been some interesting progress, efforts have mostly stayed in the research community because of the high costs and extremely slow read and write speeds. These are problems that need to be solved before DNA-based storage can be practical.

So we were surprised to hear that storage giant Seagate had entered into a collaboration with a DNA-based storage company called Catalog. To find out how close the company’s technology is to being useful, we talked to Catalog’s CEO, Hyunjun Park indicated that Catalog’s approach is counterintuitive on two levels: It doesn’t store data the way you’d expect, and it isn’t focusing on archival storage at all.

Chardan hosted its 4th Annual Chardan Genetic Medicines Conference in October 2020, featuring over 80 public and private companies representing in vivo gene therapy, ex vivo gene therapy, gene editing, RNA medicines, and other subsegments of the genetic medicines space. Among our various panels with preeminent thought leaders, we spoke with newly-minted Nobel laureate, President of the Innovative Genomics Institute, and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and Chemistry at UC Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna.

PhD about open questions and areas of innovation in the CRISPR gene editing space.

Development of medical treatment against cancer is a major research topic worldwide — but cancer often manages to circumvent the solutions found. Scientists around Tanja Weil and David Ng at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P), have now taken a closer look at the cancer’s countermeasures and aim to stop them. By disrupting the cellular components that are responsible for converting oxygen into chemical energy, they have demonstrated initial success in eliminating cells derived from untreatable metastatic cancer.

Treatment of cancer is a long-term process because remnants of living cancer cells often evolve into aggressive forms and become untreatable. Hence, treatment plans often involve multiple drug combinations and/or radiation therapy in order to prevent cancer relapse. To combat the variety of cancer cell types, modern drugs have been developed to target specific biochemical processes that are unique within each cell type.

However, cancer cells are highly adaptive and able to develop mechanisms to avoid the effects of the treatment. “We want to prevent such adaptation by invading the main pillar of cellular life — how cells breathe – that means take up oxygen — and thus produce chemical energy for growth,” says David Ng, group leader at the MPI-P.