Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have uncovered that proteins use a common chemical label as a shield to protect them from degradation, which in turn affects motility and aging. Proteins are key to all processes in our cells and understanding their functions and regulation is of major importance.

“For many years, we have known that nearly all human proteins are modified by a specific chemical group, but its functional impact has remained undefined,” says professor Thomas Arnesen at the Department of Biomedicine, University of Bergen.

Scientists from the University of California Davis (UC Davis) Comprehensive Cancer Center have recently published in Cell Death and Disease, identifying a critical protein that causes cells to die. The protein is described as an epitope, which is a section of the protein that is recognized by the immune system to activate a response. This epitope was distinctly found on the CD95 receptor, known to trigger programmed cell death. The report demonstrates a new mechanism to trigger cell death and provide further insight into improved disease treatments.

CD95 receptors, also referred to a “Fas”, are cell death receptors which are present on cell membranes. Once Fas is activated, it generates a signaling cascade which elicits cell death. The mechanism by which cells self-destruct has been an important research topic. By understanding cell death, scientists can generate better therapies for different diseases, including cancer.

Currently, cancer is treated by surgery, chemotherapy, or radiotherapy. Despite initial success, these treatments are unable to fully eradicate tumor cells. Immunotherapy is a new approach to target cancer. Immunotherapy refers to therapeutics modulating the immune system to elicit an effective immune response. This is a more indirect approach compared to lysing tumors with a chemical. One specific immunotherapy referred to as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is a treatment in which T cells, or cytotoxic immune cells, are engineered to lyse tumor cells. Unfortunately, CAR T-cell therapy is limited due to the tumor’s ability to prevent T cell activation.

Awkward name aside, the Lexus LF-ZC Concept that debuted at the Japan Mobility Show last week is a very big deal. When it goes into production in 2026, it will be the first electric vehicle on an all-new, ground-up Toyota platform; will do some very next-level things with the company’s steer-by-wire technology; and an alleged 620 miles of electric range.

It is not, however, going to do that with some huge battery pack that weighs as much as an apartment building. Instead, it’s going to rely mostly on chemistry to deliver on those big range claims.

As part of the auto show festivities, Toyota invited several international media outlets, including InsideEVs, to Japan last week. There, the world’s largest automaker previewed a number of emerging technology concepts, including a simulated “manual transmission” for electric cars, an advanced in-car AI assistant and its EV battery plans for the next few years.

Things may not have ended well for dinosaurs on Earth, but Cornell University astronomers say the “light fingerprint” of the conditions that enabled them to emerge here provide a crucial missing piece in our search for signs of life on planets orbiting alien stars.

Their analysis of the most recent 540 million years of Earth’s evolution, known as the Phanerozoic Eon, finds that telescopes could better detect potential chemical signatures of life in the atmosphere of an Earth-like exoplanet.

An exoplanet (or extrasolar planet) is a planet that is located outside our Solar System, orbiting around a star other than the Sun. The first suspected scientific detection of an exoplanet occurred in 1988, with the first confirmation of detection coming in 1992.

Engineered vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) pseudotyping offers an essential method for exploring virus–cell interactions, particularly for viruses that require high biosafety levels. Although this approach has been employed effectively, the current methodologies for virus visualization and labeling can interfere with infectivity and lead to misinterpretation of results. In this study, we introduce an innovative approach combining genetic code expansion (GCE) and click chemistry with pseudotyped VSV to produce highly fluorescent and infectious pseudoviruses (clickVSVs). These clickVSVs enable robust and precise virus–cell interaction studies without compromising the biological function of the viral surface proteins. We evaluated this approach by generating VSVs bearing a unique chemical handle for click labeling and assessing the infectivity in relevant cell lines.

Epigenetics, the chemical mechanisms that controls the activity of genes, allows our cells, tissues and organs to adapt to the changing circumstances of the environment around us. This advantage can become a drawback, though, as this epigenetic regulation can be more easily altered by toxins than the more stable genetic sequence of the DNA.

An article recently published at Science with the collaboration of the groups of Dr. Manel Esteller, Director of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC-CERCA), ICREA Research Professor and Chairman of Genetics at the University of Barcelona, and Dr. Lucas Pontel, Ramon y Cajal Fellow also of the Josep Carreras Institute, demonstrates that the substance called formaldehyde, commonly present in various household and cosmetic products, in polluted air, and widely used in construction, is a powerful modifier of normal epigenetic patterns.

The publication is led by Dr. Christopher J. Chang, of the University of California Berkeley in the United States, whose research group is pioneer in the study of the effects of various chemical products on cell metabolism. The research has focused on investigating the effects of high concentrations of formaldehyde in the body, a substance already been associated with an increased risk of developing cancer (nasopharyngeal tumours and leukaemia), hepatic degeneration due to fatty liver (steatosis) and asthma. Dr. Esteller points out that this is relevant because “formaldehyde enters our body mainly during our breathing and, because it dissolves well in an aqueous medium, it ends up reaching all the cells of our body”.

The Nobel Awards Season just ended, with the “Oscars of Science” awarded to some of the world’s brightest minds. The entire science world was watching, and just like with the Oscars, there was an element of suspense, drama, envy, celebration, and happiness. Most of the Nobel Laureates are also phenomenal speakers and communicators with decades of teaching experience, and thousands of people across the world are glued to their monitors to hear their inspiring stories. The Nobel Prizes are awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economic Sciences. Unfortunately, there is no Nobel Prize for Computer Science, Mathematics, or Engineering. So, it seems like it… More.

While there is no Nobel Prize for AI, Jumper and Hassabis may be the frontrunners for a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of AlphaFold.

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a powerful fingerprint analysis and detection technique that plays an important role in the fields of food safety, environmental protection, bio-imaging and hazardous substance identification. Electromagnetic enhancement (EM) and chemical enhancement (CM) are the two recognized mechanisms of action for amplifying Raman signals.

EM originates from the localized surface plasmonic resonance effect of noble metal nanostructures such as gold, silver, and copper, while CM originates from the charge transfer between the substrate and the probe molecules. In principle, the charge transfer efficiency depends on the coupling of the incident laser energy to the energy levels of the substrate-molecule system.

Compared to EM-based SERS substrates, CM-based SERS substrates are usually made of two-dimensional materials including semiconductor oxides, metal carbides, and graphene and its evolutions, which have weaker signal enhancement capabilities. However, the advantages of CM-based SERS substrate, such as high specificity, homogeneity and biocompatibility, have attracted the attention of researchers.

The fact that nanoparticle and polymer hybrid materials can often combine the advantages of each has been demonstrated in several fields. Embedding PNCs into polymer is an effective strategy to enhance the PNCs stability and polymer can endow the PNCs with other positive effects based on different structure and functional groups.

The uniform distribution of PNCs in polymer matrix is critical to the properties of the nanocomposites and the aggregation of PNCs induced by high surface energy has a severe influence on the performance of related applications. As such, the loading fraction is limited owing to the phase separation between PNCs and polymer.

Chemical interaction between PNCs and polymer is necessary to suppress the phase separation. Meanwhile, most of the fabrication methods of PNCs/polymer nanocomposites are spin coating, swelling-shrinking and electrospinning based on the in-situ synthesis of PNCs in polymer matrix and physical mixing, but extremely few works can achieve the fabrication of PNCs/polymer nanocomposites by bulk polymerization.