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Category: chemistry – Page 9

Watching nanoparticles form in real time uncovers ‘missing link’ in microwave-assisted manufacturing

Advanced materials power everything from batteries and electronics to clean energy technologies. For years, engineers have known that microwave-assisted synthesis can dramatically accelerate the chemical reactions used to manufacture these materials. Now, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have provided new evidence challenging a long-held assumption about why, suggesting that microwaves speed chemical reactions in a fundamentally different way than many scientists believed.

The study, led by Reeja Jayan, a professor of mechanical engineering, and CMU alumnus Morgan Chen, challenges the long-held belief that microwaves accelerate chemical reactions by lowering the amount of energy needed for those reactions to occur. Instead, the team found evidence that microwaves increase how often molecules successfully rearrange themselves into new materials.

To reach that conclusion, Jayan and Chen studied the formation of tin oxide nanoparticles, a material used in batteries, catalysts and other electronic devices. Using high-energy X-rays, they watched the nanoparticles form in real time under both conventional and microwave-assisted heating, allowing them to compare how the atomic structure evolved throughout each reaction.

‘One-pot’ CRISPR platform delivers lab-like sensitivity in 30 minutes for at-home testing

A research team from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has developed an innovative “one-pot” testing platform, known as TEMPO, that could transform highly sensitive nucleic acid testing from a laboratory-based procedure into a simple, single-step test that can be performed at home. With a single reaction tube, users can obtain results comparable to those of professional laboratory tests in as little as 30 minutes. The breakthrough has the potential to bridge the technological gap between existing rapid tests and laboratory-based nucleic acid diagnostics, offering a more convenient solution for future infectious disease surveillance and genetic screening.

TEMPO, short for “Thermodynamically Encoded Molecular Programming for One-Pot Diagnostics,” was jointly developed by a research team led by Hsing I-Ming, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at HKUST, and researchers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The platform has already demonstrated applications in the detection of a range of viral infections, including influenza, COVID-19 and HIV, while also opening new possibilities for the rapid screening of hereditary diseases.

The study, titled “Thermodynamically programmed one-pot CRISPR platform for point-of-care SNP genotyping,” is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Altered ribosomes help explain how an enzyme fuels tumor growth

A new Northwestern Medicine study has identified a previously unknown mechanism by which an enzyme promotes cancer cell proliferation, establishing it as a promising therapeutic target for cancer, according to findings published in Nature Communications.

N-acetyltransferase 10 (NAT10) is a multifunctional enzyme with oncogenic properties and has been associated with multiple types of cancer, including hepatocellular carcinoma—an aggressive type of liver cancer—and acute myeloid leukemia, among others.

NAT10 is known to acetylate, or chemically modify, RNA, but whether this mechanism supports the oncogenic properties of this protein has remained uncertain, said Daniel Arango, Ph.D., assistant professor of pharmacology and a co-corresponding author of the study.

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Scientists capture first molecular-level images of water reorganization during a reaction crucial for life

Some of nature’s most important chemical reactions rely on the coupled movement of negatively and positively charged particles. These processes play central roles in photosynthesis, catalysis and biological energy conversion yet remain difficult to observe.

Now, a research team led by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in collaboration with colleagues at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and several academic labs, has captured snapshots of these events triggered when light strikes a molecule.

The findings, published in Nature Communications, could help researchers better understand and ultimately design better flow batteries, fuel cells and catalysts.

Cancer is quantum: Studies show cancer cells may occupy limited, shared states like quantized energy levels

Andrea Califano began his career as a physicist. But that’s not why he’s now calling cancer a quantum disease. “We’re really just following the data,” says Califano, the Clyde ‘56 and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and head of Biohub, New York.

“What we’ve seen over and over again is that each type of cancer has a limited number of cellular states. Just as electrons are restricted to a limited number of quantized energy states in an atom, cancer cells can only occupy one of these stable states or be in rapid transit between them. More critically, these states are conserved across virtually all patients with a specific type of cancer.”

The newest findings from the Califano lab—published recently in two papers in Nature Genetics —add critical evidence in support of the concept, which has enormous potential to transform and simplify the treatment of almost all cancers.

Radio telescopes help scientists map molecules in space and uncover where and how stars form

You may have heard the phrase “we are made of star-stuff.” This statement by the astronomer Carl Sagan refers to the fact that elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were forged in the centers of the first stars. But how does this star-stuff evolve into the chemistry of rocks, plants and people?

Fast but error-prone AI assists in solving a decades-old fluid mechanics problem in five weeks

An AI assistant helped University of Colorado Boulder researchers solve a mathematical problem that had challenged their lab for a year and a half, though it made subtle errors along the way. The breakthrough could improve how scientists study nanoparticles—tiny particles about 1,000 times thinner than a human hair—but it reveals both the promise and limitations of AI as a scientific research partner.

The new study, published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, details the solution to a decades-old fluid mechanics problem and explains how researchers combined AI with human expertise to reach the answer.

The research was led by Ankur Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, and his graduate student, Arkava Ganguly, who spent a year and a half working on the problem. With help from Anthropic’s Claude AI, they discovered that changing a nanoparticle’s shape, such as by stretching it from a circle to a football shape, changes how fast it moves in an electric field, while adding finer features, such as bumps or ripples, does not.

This New Molecule Could Transform How We Recover Gold From Electronic Waste

A new extraction molecule uses electricity to recover metals while sharply reducing the need for chemical reagents.

Recovering valuable metals from discarded electronics, mining streams, and industrial waste usually depends on large amounts of chemical reagents. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a molecule that could allow electricity to replace much of that chemistry, potentially making metal recovery cleaner, simpler, and more energy efficient.

The findings, led by chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Xiao Su, were published in ACS Energy Letters.

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