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Category: chemistry – Page 9

Helical nanoparticles trigger cancer alarms and deliver gene therapy

Cancer cells survive by hiding from the immune system’s surveillance. A KAIST research team has developed a new anticancer platform that makes cancer cells send out their own danger signals—prompting immune cells to attack—while simultaneously delivering gene therapy. The approach is expected to offer a new treatment strategy that combines cancer immunotherapy and gene therapy in a single nanoparticle.

Immunogenic cell death (ICD) is a process in which dying cancer cells send danger signals to nearby immune cells, prompting them to attack. A polypeptide is a polymer made of a long chain of amino acids.

A team led by Professor Yeu-Chun Kim from the KAIST Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering developed a “helical polypeptide nanoparticle” platform that induces severe stress inside cancer cells to trigger immunogenic cell death while also delivering a range of gene therapeutics into the cells. The findings are published in the journal Biomaterials.

Dynamic ‘breathing’ in nanopore structures can maximize efficiency of molecule separation and diffusion

Nanoporous material-based separation technology is vital in many applications because it can precisely distinguish between and separate nearly identical chemical or biochemical molecules.

Previous research by Professor Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (WPI-iCeMS) and colleagues, published in Nature, applied this technology to separate two very similar types of water molecules—regular water (H₂O) and heavy water (D₂O), which have similar overall properties but slightly different masses. But the underlying mechanisms of that separation were not well understood.

Now, a study led by Professor Shinji Saito of the Institute for Molecular Science (IMS) in Japan and published in Nature Communications in July has provided a theoretical explanation for that phenomenon, using H₂O and D₂O molecules to study nanopore behavior in a metal-organic framework.

Scientists demonstrate transition between strong and weak coupling regimes in a polariton microcavity

Researchers from Skoltech, together with colleagues from the N.D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry and Westlake University, have experimentally demonstrated how the operating regime of a polariton laser changes with a gradual increase in cavity thickness.

They demonstrated a smooth transition between strong and weak coupling regimes within a single structure in the visible spectral range using the organic copolymer MeLPPP. The study opens opportunities for developing ultrafast optical transistors and room-temperature coherent light sources. The results of the study have been published in the journal Nanophotonics.

A polariton is a quasiparticle representing a hybrid of light and matter, formed through the interaction of photons with a semiconductor structure. When a critical density of polaritons in the sample is reached, their wave functions synchronize, and the quasiparticles relax to the lowest-energy state, forming a polariton condensate—a coherent macroscopic state and a source of coherent light.

Nanoreactor Mimics Living Cells To Supercharge Artificial Photosynthesis

A biomimetic nanoreactor combines cellular design principles to produce hydrogen peroxide efficiently under visible light.

Inside a hollow nanoscale structure, researchers have recreated two strategies that living cells use to control chemical reactions. The resulting CdS@polydopamine nanoreactor offers a synthetic way to reproduce some of the organization and efficiency found in biological systems.

The work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Can Li of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), led the research with Jian Liu’s group at Inner Mongolia University.

Low-temperature technique grows crystal-aligned semiconductor films

Building next-generation semiconductors and low-power electronic devices requires precisely stacking materials with different functions. In this process, it is essential to preserve each material’s intrinsic properties, as well as the interface where the two materials meet, without damage. Layered van der Waals materials, including transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), have attracted considerable attention as next-generation semiconductor platforms because their layers interact through weak forces, enabling different materials to be stacked while maintaining atomically clean interfaces.

A research team led by Professor Joonki Suh from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST, in collaboration with Professor Bonggeun Shong’s team at Hanyang University and Professor Yimo Han’s team at Rice University in the United States, have developed a new semiconductor manufacturing technique based on atomic layer deposition (ALD). ALD is a thin-film deposition process in which semiconductor precursors are supplied sequentially, enabling uniform thin films to be deposited with atomic-level control over their thickness. The paper is published in Science Advances.

The research team focused on van der Waals materials. These two-dimensional semiconductor materials consist of multiple atomic layers held together by weak interlayer forces, allowing them to be peeled apart into sheets as thin as paper. Because different materials can be freely stacked, van der Waals materials are attracting attention as key building blocks for next-generation AI chips and ultra-low-power semiconductor devices.

New process turns mixed plastic waste directly into hydrogen fuel without sorting

Plastic has become a ubiquitous part of modern life—in water bottles, shopping bags and car dashboards. But once discarded, it is among the hardest materials on Earth to recycle. Most recycling processes require plastics to be sorted by type first, a step that is both labor-intensive and costly. As a result, only 9% of discarded plastic is actually recycled, while 79% is dumped in landfills and another 12% is incinerated, releasing carbon dioxide in the process.

Now, a team co-led by researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Ewha Womans University in South Korea has demonstrated a new chemical approach that converts a mixture of the three most common plastics directly into high-purity hydrogen fuel at temperatures far below conventional gasification. The process locks carbon dioxide away as a solid mineral without releasing the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows that alkaline thermal treatment (ATT)—a process in which sodium hydroxide reacts with organic material under heat to drive hydrogen production—can efficiently handle mixed polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) waste in a single reactor, yielding hydrogen gas with purities exceeding 90% without requiring any sorting of plastic types.

Carbon–bismuth bonds reveal that relativity blurs the textbook line between sigma and pi bonds

Brown University chemists have provided direct evidence that upends the textbook explanation of how triple chemical bonds work in heavy elements. In a study published in Science, the researchers show evidence that when atomic nuclei are sufficiently heavy, the principles described in Einstein’s theory of relativity change the structure of triple bonds—blurring the lines between the two separate types of bonds involved in textbook triple bonding.

Using a technique called photoelectron spectroscopy, the Brown team showed bonds created by carbon and the heavy element bismuth have the telltale signature of relativistic bonds.

“This idea that relativity is important in heavy elements has been around since the 1970s,” said Lai-Sheng Wang, a professor of chemistry at Brown and the study’s corresponding author. “But we show direct spectroscopic evidence that what we learned in high school about chemical bonding isn’t true in heavy elements.”

Insect-inspired electronic nose: Turning semiconductor chips into olfactory sensors

Bioengineers at the University of California San Diego integrated the olfactory receptor of an insect called a jumping bristletail into semiconductor chips made of graphene, creating an electronic nose capable of sniffing out a wide variety of small organic compounds. This biomimetic bioelectronic sensor can detect and distinguish between molecules that are difficult for conventional electronic sensors to differentiate. This work opens the door to building semiconductor-based chemical sensing systems inspired by nature for applications in health care, environmental monitoring, food quality, agriculture and biodefense.

In a paper published in Advanced Materials, researchers led by bioengineers at UC San Diego describe a method for manufacturing the MhOR5 odorant receptor from the insect Machilis hrabei at scale and chemically attaching the purified MhOR5 protein to high-performance graphene field effect transistors (gFETs). gFETs are semiconductor devices that rely on graphene instead of silicon as the conductive material, resulting in exceptional sensitivity to molecular changes.

The researchers tested their MhOR5-functionalized gFETs against 16 chemically diverse compounds, including DEET, hexanol and eugenol, at different concentrations. The sensor produced a concentration-dependent electrical response for each of the 16 compounds.

Membrane nanostructures reshape in water, revealing route to better ion transport

Next-generation energy devices like fuel cells and water electrolyzers depend on ion-exchange membranes that allow only water and certain ions to pass through.

The design of these membranes affects how efficient these devices can be. Understanding how the materials used in them influence their performance is key to advancing these technologies.

At the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), researchers collaborated with scientists at New York University to study the backbone chemistry of different types of ion-exchange membranes to better understand how their chemical makeup governs their structure and performance.

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