As power demand surges in the AI era, the protonic ceramic electrochemical cell (PCEC), which can simultaneously produce electricity and hydrogen, is gaining attention as a next-generation energy technology. However, this cell has faced the technical limitation of requiring an ultra-high production temperature of 1,500°C.
A KAIST research team has succeeded in establishing a new manufacturing process that lowers this limit by more than 500°C for the first time.
Researchers studying Yellowstone’s depths discovered that small earthquakes can recharge underground microbial life.
The quakes exposed new rock and fluids, creating bursts of chemical energy that microbes can use. Both the water chemistry and the microbial communities shifted dramatically in response. This dynamic may help explain how life survives in deep, dark environments.
A large portion of earth’s life lives underground.
For the first time, MIT chemists have synthesized a fungal compound known as verticillin A, which was discovered more than 50 years ago and has shown potential as an anticancer agent.
The compound has a complex structure that made it more difficult to synthesize than related compounds, even though it differed by only a couple of atoms.
“We have a much better appreciation for how those subtle structural changes can significantly increase the synthetic challenge,” says Mohammad Movassaghi, an MIT professor of chemistry. “Now we have the technology where we can not only access them for the first time, more than 50 years after they were isolated, but also we can make many designed variants, which can enable further detailed studies.”
In tests in human cancer cells, a derivative of verticillin A showed particular promise against a type of pediatric brain cancer called diffuse midline glioma. More tests will be needed to evaluate its potential for clinical use, the researchers say.
Movassaghi and Jun Qi, an associate professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and Harvard Medical School, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Walker Knauss PhD ’24 is the lead author of the paper. Xiuqi Wang, a medicinal chemist and chemical biologist at Dana-Farber, and Mariella Filbin, research director in the Pediatric Neurology-Oncology Program at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, are also authors of the study.
Purdue University researchers found that a subset of epidermal cells in plant leaves serves as early responders to chemical cues from bacterial pathogens and communicate this information to neighbors through a local traveling wave of calcium ions. The properties of this local wave differ from those generated when epidermal cells are wounded, suggesting that distinct mechanisms are used by plants to communicate specific types of pathogen attack, the team reported Dec. 2 in Science Signaling.
The new work from Purdue’s Emergent Mechanisms in Biology of Robustness Integration and Organization (EMBRIO) Institute highlights the importance of calcium ion signatures or patterns in the cytoplasm of cells. Plants and animals use calcium ions to transmit biologically critical sensory information within single cells, across tissues and even between organs.
“When a bacterium infects plant material, or when a fungus tries to invade plant tissue, cells and tissues recognize the presence of an attacker,” said Christopher Staiger, a professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology and Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences. “They recognize both chemical and mechanical cues. This study is largely about how the chemical cues are sensed.”
One of the hallmarks of cancer cells is their ability to evade apoptosis, or programmed cell death, through changes in protein expression. Inducing apoptosis in cancer cells has become a major focus of novel cancer therapies, as these approaches may be less toxic to healthy tissue than conventional chemotherapy or radiation. Many chemical agents are currently being tested for their ability to trigger apoptosis, and researchers are increasingly exploring light-activated molecules that can be precisely targeted to tumor sites using lasers, sparing surrounding healthy tissue.
Cancer cells have mitochondria that supply energy for rapid growth and division, but an overly alkaline environment is thought to disrupt mitochondrial function, leading to apoptosis.
A microbial protein called Archaerhodopsin-3 (AR3) may hold the key to alkalinity-induced apoptosis. When exposed to green light, AR3 pumps hydrogen ions out of the cell, increasing alkalinity, disrupting cellular functions, and eventually inducing apoptosis.
Cornell scientists have discovered a potentially transformative approach to manufacturing one of the world’s most widely used chemicals—hydrogen peroxide—using nothing more than sunlight, water and air. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.
“Currently, hydrogen peroxide is made through the anthraquinone process, which relies on fossil fuels, produces chemical waste and requires transport of concentrated peroxide—all of which have safety and environmental concerns,” said Alireza Abbaspourrad, associate professor of Food Chemistry and Ingredient Technology in the Department of Food Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and corresponding author of the research.
Hydrogen peroxide is ubiquitous in both industrial and consumer settings: It bleaches paper, treats wastewater, disinfects wounds and household surfaces, and plays a key role in electronics manufacturing. Global production runs into the millions of tons each year. Yet today’s process depends almost entirely on a complex method involving hazardous intermediates and large-scale central chemical plants.
