Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: chemistry

Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are industrial chemicals used in the manufacturing of thousands of products, including cosmetics, carpeting, non-stick cookware, stain-resistant fabrics, firefighting foams, food packaging, and waterproof clothing.

They’re everywhere — the environment, our food, and even in our bodies. Peer-reviewed studies have shown that exposure to PFAS may lead to decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, and increased risk of some cancers. And they take hundreds or even thousands of years to break down.

For roughly the past 10 years, researchers have been looking for ways to remove PFAS from the environment or at least degrade them into harmless, inorganic compounds.

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The automated synthesis of plasmonic nanoparticles with on-demand properties is a challenging task. Here the authors integrate a fluidic reactor, real-time characterization, and machine learning in a self-driven lab for the photochemical synthesis of nanoparticles with targeted properties.

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The expression of genes has to be carefully regulated in cells; active genes give cells their identity and ability to function. Epigenetic features are just one way that cells control gene expression, and they do so without altering the sequence of genes. These may involve chemical groups like methyl tags that adorn DNA, or structural characteristics that relate to proteins that organize DNA. But scientists have also been learning about how epigenetics affect RNA. New findings on a balancing act in epigenetics, which works on DNA and RNA, have been reported in Cell.

When genes are expressed, they are transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules. The cell can then translate those mRNA molecules into proteins, which carry out a variety of functions. Scientists have identified an epigenetic mechanism that seems to balance gene expression. One facet of the mechanism can promote the transcription and organization of genes, while the other causes mRNA transcripts to lose stability, and can adjust how those transcripts are used. This work has shown that DNA and RNA epigenetics may be more closely linked than known.

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A new technology developed at MIT enables scientists to label proteins across millions of individual cells in fully intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using the technology, the team was able to richly label large tissue samples in a single day. In their new study in Nature Biotechnology, they also demonstrate that the ability to label proteins with antibodies at the single-cell level across large tissue samples can reveal insights left hidden by other widely used labeling methods.

Profiling the proteins that cells are making is a staple of studies in biology, neuroscience, and related fields because the proteins a cell is expressing at a given moment can reflect the functions the cell is trying to perform or its response to its circumstances, such as disease or treatment. As much as microscopy and labeling technologies have advanced, enabling innumerable discoveries, scientists have still lacked a reliable and practical way of tracking protein expression at the level of millions of densely packed individual cells in whole, 3D intact tissues. Often confined to thin tissue sections under slides, scientists therefore haven’t had tools to thoroughly appreciate cellular protein expression in the whole, connected systems in which it occurs.

“Conventionally, investigating the molecules within cells requires dissociating tissue into single cells or slicing it into thin sections, as light and chemicals required for analysis cannot penetrate deep into tissues. Our lab developed technologies such as CLARITY and SHIELD, which enable investigation of whole organs by rendering them transparent, but we now needed a way to chemically label whole organs to gain useful scientific insights,” says study senior author Kwanghun Chung, associate professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the departments of Chemical Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. “If cells within a tissue are not uniformly processed, they cannot be quantitatively compared. In conventional protein labeling, it can take weeks for these molecules to diffuse into intact organs, making uniform chemical processing of organ-scale tissues virtually impossible and extremely slow.”

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Y ou could be forgiven for thinking that the turn of the millennium was a golden age for the life sciences. After the halcyon days of the 1950s and ’60s when the structure of DNA, the true nature of genes and the genetic code itself were discovered, the Human Genome Project, launched in 1990 and culminating with a preliminary announcement of the entire genome sequence in 2000, looked like – and was presented as – a comparably dramatic leap forward in our understanding of the basis of life itself. As Bill Clinton put it when the draft sequence was unveiled: ‘Today we are learning the language in which God created life.’ Portentous stuff.

The genome sequence reveals the order in which the chemical building blocks (of which there are four distinct types) that make up our DNA are arranged along the molecule’s double-helical strands. Our genomes each have around 3 billion of these ‘letters’; reading them all is a tremendous challenge, but the Human Genome Project (HGP) transformed genome sequencing within the space of a couple of decades from a very slow and expensive procedure into something you can get done by mail order for the price of a meal for two.

Since that first sequence was unveiled in 2000, hundreds of thousands of human genomes have now been decoded, giving an indication of the person-to-person variation in sequence. This information has provided a vital resource for biomedicine, enabling us, for example, to identify which parts of the genome correlate with which diseases and traits. And all that investment in gene-sequencing technology was more than justified merely by its use for studying and tracking the SARS-CoV-2 virus during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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A research team led by Wang Guozhong from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a novel method to precisely control the size of nickel (Ni) particles in catalysts, improving their performance in hydrogenation reactions.

The findings, published in Advanced Functional Materials, offer new insights into catalyst design for .

Catalysts play a crucial role in accelerating without being consumed, and the size of metal particles within them is a key factor influencing their performance.

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Graham Cooks and his team at Purdue University have discovered a chemical process that has exciting implications for people who believe that life could have emerged spontaneously and through natural means. The idea that the building blocks of life started in a primordial ocean now has a competitor: airborne tiny water droplets.

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Estimating spectral features of quantum many-body systems has attracted great attention in condensed matter physics and quantum chemistry. To achieve this task, various experimental and theoretical techniques have been developed, such as spectroscopy techniques1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and quantum simulation either by engineering controlled quantum devices8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16 or executing quantum algorithms17,18,19,20 such as quantum phase estimation and variational algorithms. However, probing the behaviour of complex quantum many-body systems remains a challenge, which demands substantial resources for both approaches. For instance, a real probe by neutron spectroscopy requires access to large-scale facilities with high-intensity neutron beams, while quantum computation of eigenenergies typically requires controlled operations with a long coherence time17,18. Efficient estimation of spectral properties has become a topic of increasing interest in this noisy intermediate-scale quantum era21.

A potential solution to efficient spectral property estimation is to extract the spectral information from the dynamics of observables, rather than relying on real probes such as scattering spectroscopy, or direct computation of eigenenergies. This approach capitalises on the basics in quantum mechanics that spectral information is naturally carried by the observable’s dynamics10,20,22,23,24,25,26. In a solid system with translation invariance, for instance, the dynamic structure factor, which can be probed in spectroscopy experiments7,26, reaches its local maximum when both the energy and momentum selection rules are satisfied. Therefore, the energy dispersion can be inferred by tracking the peak of intensities in the energy excitation spectrum.

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Ibogaine—a psychoactive plant derivative—has attracted attention for its anti-addictive and anti-depressant properties. But ibogaine is a finite resource, extracted from plants native to Africa like the iboga shrub (Tabernanthe iboga) and the small-fruited voacanga tree (Voacanga africana). Further, its use can lead to irregular heartbeats, introducing safety risks and an overall need to better understand how its molecular structure leads to its biological effects.

In a study appearing in Nature Chemistry, researchers at the University of California, Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics (IPN) report the successful of ibogaine, ibogaine analogs and related compounds from pyridine—a relatively inexpensive and widely available chemical.

The team’s strategy enabled the synthesis of four naturally occurring ibogaine-related alkaloids as well as several non-natural analogs. Overall yields ranged from 6% to 29% after only six or seven steps, a marked increase in efficiency from previous synthetic efforts to produce similar compounds.

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Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the research by scientists at King’s College London and their collaborators suggests that chromatin—the complex of DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

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