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Category: chemistry – Page 23

New study reveals CRISPR enzyme that responds to human DNA methylation

Cancer cells excel at evading detection, but subtle chemical differences set them apart from healthy cells. Now, a team of scientists from Wageningen University & Research and Van Andel Institute has identified a way to exploit this distinction. Using a variant of CRISPR, a modern tool for editing DNA, they distinguished tumor DNA from healthy DNA and selectively cut only the former. The study, published today in Nature, is an early but promising step toward a cancer therapy that targets and destroys tumor cells with high precision.

The new method relies on methyl groups, small chemical tags attached to DNA that regulate whether genes are on or off. This process, called DNA methylation, is altered in cancer cells and can act as a molecular “fingerprint” that differentiates malignant cells from healthy ones.

Each protein in the epigenome produces a different pattern of gene expression, study finds

A new study finds the proteins responsible for controlling which genes are expressed in a genome do more than simply turn a gene on or off. Essentially, each type of protein that interacts with a gene produces different behaviors—a finding with ramifications for everything from biomedical therapeutics to biological computing. A paper on the study, “Epigenome Regulators Imbue a Single Eukaryotic Promoter with Diverse Gene Expression Dynamics,” is published in the journal iScience.

At issue are “epigenome regulators.” Every organism’s genome is made up of DNA. But that DNA is bound up with many different proteins into very compact structures. The proteins that are bound to the DNA are called the epigenome, and they control which parts of the DNA get expressed. Your blood cells, nerve cells, and skin cells all have the same DNA, but perform very different functions. That’s because different parts of the DNA sequence are being expressed in each cell—and that is largely controlled by which proteins are bound to different parts of the DNA in each cell.

“We already knew that the proteins in the epigenome control the way DNA is expressed,” says Albert Keung, corresponding author of the study and an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. “Our goal here was to look at a single gene and quantify the full range of ways that the gene could be expressed by different proteins.” Keung is the Goodnight Distinguished Scholar in Innovation in Biotechnology and Biomolecular Engineering and director of biotechnology programs in NC State’s Integrative Sciences Initiative.

Quantum model explains how single electrons cause damage inside silicon chips

Researchers in the UC Santa Barbara Materials Department have uncovered the elusive quantum mechanism by which energetic electrons break chemical bonds inside microelectronic devices—a detrimental process that slowly degrades performance over time. The discovery, published as an Editors’ Suggestion in Physical Review B, explains decades-old experimental puzzles and moves scientists closer to engineering more reliable devices.

Nanobody repairs misfolded CFTR inside cells, boosting function in cystic fibrosis

A tiny antibody component could fundamentally transform the treatment of cystic fibrosis: For the first time, researchers have succeeded in developing a so-called nanobody that penetrates directly into human cells and can repair the chloride channel most commonly affected in cystic fibrosis. The innovative therapeutic approach was developed in collaboration between teams from Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP). The results have now been published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

The clinical picture of cystic fibrosis—also known as CF—is caused by genetic defects in the so-called CFTR channel. This channel regulates water and salt transport in the lung mucosa and ensures the production of sufficiently fluid mucus. In about 90% of cystic fibrosis patients, a mutation known as F508del is present in the CFTR channel, meaning that a single amino acid is missing at position 508 in its protein chain. This change causes CFTR to fold incorrectly and break down prematurely inside the cell, rather than functioning as a channel in the cell membrane of the airways.

As a result, patients have thick mucus in their lungs, and pathogens can no longer be effectively cleared. The consequence is chronic infection and inflammation of the airways, leading to a progressive loss of lung function—in the worst-case scenario, this necessitates a lung transplant.

Platinum-free catalyst splits hydrogen from water for energy, running 1,000 hours at industry standards

Using a renewable energy source has multiple benefits, including reducing harmful emissions and dependence on fossil fuels while increasing efficiency. But many renewable energy sources have a higher cost than fossil fuels due to the materials needed to make them usable, such as platinum group metals (PGMs), and the high cost of storage.

A team of researchers led by Gang Wu, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is working to change that. The team is creating a heterostructure catalyst for an anion-exchange membrane water electrolyzer (AEMWE) that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from renewable sources. They created the catalyst with two phosphides that gave them an efficient method to extract hydrogen, a valuable yet low-cost source of zero-emissions fuel. The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Wu’s team has been looking for alternatives to catalysts that use expensive platinum group metals. In this research, their idea began with using sunlight, wind or water to create electricity that they could then use to separate hydrogen from water.

Two bacteria join forces to turn chemical signals into electricity, opening up low-cost sensing options

Bacterial sensors usually rely on emitting light to transfer information about what they’re sensing, but that method isn’t practical in many settings. That’s why most information transmission is done via electricity. And while electricity-emitting bacteria exist, manipulating them into useful sensors has been quite challenging. Rice University professor Caroline Ajo-Franklin’s group, working in collaboration with researchers from Tufts University and Baylor College of Medicine, recently developed a flexible bioelectrical sensor system called electroactive co-culture sensing system (e-COSENS). The study is published in Nature Biotechnology.

“Bioelectrical sensing is by no means a new concept,” said Ajo-Franklin, the Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor of Biosciences and corresponding author on this paper. “But e-COSENS is the first system that allows us to easily engineer bioelectronic sensors in a modular manner, like assembling Legos, allowing us to potentially use them to monitor everything from human health to environmental contaminants.”

Bioelectrical sensing requires bacteria that produce electricity and are easy for researchers to manipulate to respond to different substances. Ideally, the bacteria would be able to live in a variety of different places so that the system could be used in environments ranging from rivers to milk.

AI turns plain-language prompts into lab-ready recipes for novel materials

Advances in artificial intelligence promise to help chemical engineers discover complex new materials. These materials could be used for reactions such as turning carbon dioxide into fuel, but technical barriers have limited catalysis adoption so far. Researchers at the University of Rochester are now harnessing the benefits of large language models (LLMs) similar to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to empower more researchers to use AI to discover new materials and accelerate experiment workflows.

In a study published in ACS Central Science, a team led by Marc Porosoff, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering, and Andrew White, visiting associate professor and the cofounder and chief technology officer of Edison Scientific, describes an AI based–method they developed that allows users to input natural language prompts about the materials they want to create and suggest optimal procedures for experiments to produce them. As the users run the experiments, they input the results back into the AI model and continue iterating until they reach their goal.

“We’re able to leverage the pre-trained knowledge of large language models and well-established statistical methods for materials discovery to help us as researchers navigate large experimental design spaces more efficiently,” says Porosoff.

AI and the mysteries of reality

Does AI have the potential to uncover the mysteries of reality, or does it lack the capacity for genuine discovery?

With the 2024 Nobel Prizes for physics and chemistry both awarded for AI-related science, claims that AI will soon make novel scientific breakthroughs on its own are growing louder.

Start-ups are already attempting to create “The AI Scientist,” and researchers at Imperial College argue AI will “usher in a new age of discovery to rival the golden age of the scientific method.” But critics argue the scientific capability of AI remains unknown.

Join computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, philosopher Steve Fuller, and co-curator of “AI: More than Human” Suzanne Livingston to debate what AI can and can’t do for science.

Tap here to watch now.

The 2024 Nobel Prizes for physics and chemistry were both won for AI-related science, leading some to claim that AI will soon be making novel scientific discoveries on its own. Start-ups are already attempting to create “The AI Scientist,” which will one day “fully automate scientific discovery.” And researchers at Imperial College argue AI will.

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