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Category: chemistry – Page 26

Improved method for producing designer proteins prevents misfolding

Proteins are the building blocks of life. They consist of folded peptide chains, which in turn are made up of a series of amino acids. From stabilizing cell structure to catalyzing chemical reactions, proteins have many functions. Their diversity is further increased by modifications that take place after the peptide chains have been synthesized.

One form of modification is protein splicing. The protein initially contains a so-called “intein,” which removes itself from the peptide chain to ensure the correct folding and function of the final protein.

A team led by protein chemist Prof Henning Mootz and Ph.D. student Christoph Humberg from the Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Münster has now answered a long-standing research question: Why does a special variant of the inteins, the “split inteins,” often encounter problems in the laboratory that significantly lower the efficiency of the reaction? The researchers were able to identify protein misfolding as one cause and have developed a method to prevent it.

This Bizarre Shape-Shifting Liquid Bends The Laws of Thermodynamics

A container of oil and water separated by a thin skin of magnetized particles has intrigued a team of chemical engineers by taking on an unexpected ‘Grecian urn’ shape upon agitation.

“I thought ‘what is this thing?’,” graduate student Anthony Raykh from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recalled, after doing what all chemistry students love to do, mixing materials with intriguing properties just to see what would happen.

“So, I walked up and down the halls of the Polymer Science and Engineering Department, knocking on my professors’ doors, asking them if they knew what was going on.”

Iron Without Fire: How Electricity Could Replace the Blast Furnace

Ironmaking could be on the edge of a major upgrade. Scientists have developed a cleaner, electrochemical method to extract iron that could one day rival traditional blast furnaces in cost while slashing pollution.

By customizing iron oxide particles and optimizing electrical conditions, the team achieved efficient, low-temperature metal production—paving the way for greener steelmaking on an industrial scale.

Rethinking Ironmaking with Electrochemistry.

Study Tracks Chromium Chemistry in Irradiated Molten Salts

UPTON, N.Y. — High temperatures and ionizing radiation create extremely corrosive environments inside a nuclear reactor. To design long-lasting reactors, scientists must understand how radiation-induced chemical reactions impact structural materials. Chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory recently performed experiments showing that radiation-induced reactions may help mitigate the corrosion of reactor metals in a new type of reactor cooled by molten salts. Their findings are published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.

“Molten salt reactors are an emerging technology for safer, scalable nuclear energy production. These advanced reactors can operate at higher, more efficient temperatures than traditional water-cooled reactor technologies while maintaining relatively ambient pressure,” explained James Wishart, a distinguished chemist at Brookhaven Lab and leader of the research.

Unlike water-cooled reactors, molten salt reactors use a coolant made entirely of positively and negatively charged ions, which remain in a liquid state only at high temperatures. It’s similar to melting table salt crystals until they flow without adding any other liquid.

Proving quantum computers have the edge

Quantum computers promise to outperform today’s traditional computers in many areas of science, including chemistry, physics, and cryptography, but proving they will be superior has been challenging. The most well-known problem in which quantum computers are expected to have the edge, a trait physicists call “quantum advantage,” involves factoring large numbers, a hard math problem that lies at the root of securing digital information.

In 1994, Caltech alumnus Peter Shor (BS ‘81), then at Bell Labs, developed a that would easily factor a large number in just seconds, whereas this type of problem could take a classical computer millions of years. Ultimately, when quantum computers are ready and working—a goal that researchers say may still be a decade or more away—these machines will be able to quickly factor large numbers behind cryptography schemes.

But, besides Shor’s algorithm, researchers have had a hard time coming up with problems where quantum computers will have a proven advantage. Now, reporting in a recent Nature Physics study titled “Local minima in ,” a Caltech-led team of researchers has identified a common physics problem that these futuristic machines would excel at solving. The problem has to do with simulating how materials cool down to their lowest-energy states.

Even a sublethal insecticide dose may disrupt the pollinator mating process

Insecticides can help protect crops against troublesome pests, but they also pose a risk for beneficial insects such as pollinators. A study led by researchers at Penn State provides insight into how even sublethal doses of insecticides can negatively affect pollinators by disrupting the mating process.

The study, published in the journal Science of The Total Environment, looked at the effects of imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid that is among the most widely used insecticides globally.

The researchers found that exposure to the insecticide, even at sublethal levels, reduced successful mating in bumble bees and altered the chemical signaling of both males and gynes—female bees capable of reproduction. It also negatively impacted both sperm viability in males and lipid storage in gynes.

Protein editing using a coordinated transposition reaction

Protein engineering through the ligation of polypeptide fragments has proven enormously powerful for studying biochemical processes. In general, this strategy necessitates a final protein-folding step, constraining the types of systems amenable to the approach. Here, we report a method that allows internal regions of target proteins to be replaced in a single operation. Conceptually, our system is analogous to a DNA transposition reaction but uses orthogonal pairs of engineered split inteins to mediate the editing process. This “protein transposition” reaction is applied to several systems, including folded protein complexes, allowing the efficient introduction of a variety of noncoded elements. By carrying out a molecular “cut and paste” under native protein-folding conditions, our approach substantially expands the scope of protein semisynthesis.

MXene Nanozymes in Bioelectricity-Enhanced Cancer Therapy

MXenes are a class of two-dimensional transition metal carbides noted for their high conductivity and biocompatibility. These properties make them promising candidates for biomedical applications.

In this study, the researchers focused on the electrochemical and nanozymatic properties of MXene in order to enhance cancer treatment through electrical pulse therapy.

A new study shows that MXene-based nanozymes enhance cancer treatment by combining catalytic activity with electrical pulses, increasing tumor cell death and modulating immune response pathways.

A geological timescale for bacterial evolution and oxygen adaptation

Microbial life has dominated Earth’s history but left a sparse fossil record, greatly hindering our understanding of evolution in deep time. However, bacterial metabolism has left signatures in the geochemical record, most conspicuously the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). We combine machine learning and phylogenetic reconciliation to infer ancestral bacterial transitions to aerobic lifestyles, linking them to the GOE to calibrate the bacterial time tree. Extant bacterial phyla trace their diversity to the Archaean and Proterozoic, and bacterial families prior to the Phanerozoic. We infer that most bacterial phyla were ancestrally anaerobic and adopted aerobic lifestyles after the GOE. However, in the cyanobacterial ancestor, aerobic metabolism likely predated the GOE, which may have facilitated the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.