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Category: chemistry – Page 374

The periodic table is chemistry’s holy text. Not only does it list all of the tools at chemists’ disposal, but its mere shape—where these elements fall into specific rows and columns—has made profound predictions about new elements and their properties that later came true. But few chemists on Earth have a closer relationship with the document than Dawn Shaughnessy, whose team is partially responsible for adding six new elements to table’s ranks.

Shaughnessy leads a team of real-life alchemists. You might be familiar with alchemy as a medieval European practice where mystics attempted to transmute elements into more valuable ones. But rather than turn the element lead into gold, Shaughnessy and her team turned plutonium into flerovium.

Shaughnessy’s parents encouraged her to pursue science from a young age—her father was an engineer, and she had an electronics kit as well as a chemistry set as a child. She’d first thought about doing orthopedic research but didn’t want to cut people open, she explained to me, and chemistry was a natural fit. But when she arrived at the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate, she learned that chemistry could be more than just mixing liquids in beakers. She could create the atoms themselves.

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Sir Aaron Klug, OM, who has died aged 92, won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his work in charting the infinitely complex structures of chromosomes, the body’s largest molecules.

Human genes are made of nucleic acids such as DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). The acids are too small to be seen with an ordinary microscope and too large to be studied by examining them under X-rays.

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At Jezero, Mars 2020’s goal will be “to explore the history of water and chemistry in an ancient crater lake basin and associated river-delta environments to probe early Martian climates and search for life.”

NASA announced this morning the selection of Jezero crater for the landing site of the Mars 2020 mission. Jezero is a 45-kilometer-wide crater that once held a lake, and now holds a spectacular ancient river delta.

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Researchers from the Departments of Chemistry and Engineering Science at the University of Oxford have found a general way of predicting enzyme activity. Enzymes are the protein catalysts that perform most of the key functions in Biology. Published in Nature Chemical Biology, the researchers’ novel AI approach is based on the enzyme’s sequence, together with the screening of a defined ‘training set’ of substrates and the right chemical parameters to define them.

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More information on the search for natural senolytics (that clear the senescent cells and potentially make us younger)- on ficetin, found in abundance for example in strawberries, a newly published study and discussion in the blog of Josh Mitteldorf. But we still would have to consume around 20 kg strawberries for two consecutive days to reach the dose used in the happy longer living mice!

Senolytic drugs have been the most promising near-term anti-aging therapy since the ground-breaking paper by van Deursen of Mayo Clinic published in 2011 . The body accumulates senescent cells as we age, damaged cells that send out signal molecules that in turn modify our biochemistry in a toxic, pro-inflammatory direction. Though the number of such cells is small, the damage they do is great. Van Deursen showed that just getting rid of these cells could increase lifespan of mice by ~25%. But he did it with a trick, using genetically engineered mice in which the senescent cells had a built-in self-destruct switch.

After that, the race was on to find chemical agents that would do the same thing without the genetically engineered self-destruct. They must selectively kill senescent cells, while leaving all other cells unharmed. It’s a tall order, because even a little residual toxicity to normal cells can be quite damaging. Before last week, the two best candidates were FOXO4-DRI and a combination of quercetin with dasatinib .

I’ve written in the past ( here and here ) that senolytic drugs are our best prospect for a near-term lift on the road to anti-aging medicine.

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Thoughts on the Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing held by Heales in Brussels.

When I first learned about the possibility of achieving human rejuvenation through biotechnological means, little did I know that this would lead me to meet many of the central figures in the field during a conference some seven years later—let alone that I would be speaking at the very same event. Yet, I’ve had the privilege to attend the Fourth Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing (EHA) held in Brussels on November 8–10, an experience that gave me a feel of just how real the prospect of human rejuvenation is.

A friendly, welcoming environment

As EHA was the first conference I’ve ever attended, I didn’t quite know what to expect; given that researchers, activists, and investors from all around the world were invited, I had imagined it would probably be a posh, formal event with violins playing on the background and people in suits and formal dresses discussing topics beyond my comprehension while enjoying champagne. Thankfully, the atmosphere was much more relaxed and informal, elegant but not intimidating, which favored the interaction among participants regardless of their backgrounds—though, alas, the topics discussed were indeed mostly beyond my comprehension, as they involved high-level biochemistry with which I’m nowhere near sufficiently familiar (yet).

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Wonderful to see the continuing progress of Mr. Omar Flores, with the support of his lovely wife, actress Mayra Sierra, today on the Venga la Alegria (VLA) show on TV Azteca (http://www.aztecauno.com/vengalaalegria) — The importance of an integrated approach to curing spinal cord injury including family, physical therapists, and the medical team at Regenerage (https://regenerage.clinic/)

MIT has launched the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, a $1 billion center dedicated to “reshaping its academic program” around AI. The idea, said MIT president L. Rafael Reif, is to use AI, machine learning and data science with other academic disciplines to “educate the bilinguals of the future,” defining bilingual as those working in biology, chemistry, politics, history and linguistics with computing skills that can be used in their field.

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