Lifeboat Foundation

Recovery of the Antarctic ozone layer is anticipated to take place sometime around 2070.

The depletion of the ozone layer had a huge impact on humanity for a while. Moreover, the United Nations accepted The International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer in 1994.

Every living thing on Earth is shielded from UV radiation by the stratospheric ozone layer. Thus, the Ozone Layer is vital for all forms of life, and we need to protect it without a doubt.

The genetic encoding of ncAAs with distinct chemical, biological, and physical properties requires the engineering of bioorthogonal translational machinery, consisting of an evolved aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA pair and a “blank” codon. To achieve this, the researchers mimicked the ibis’ ability to synthesize sTyr and incorporate it into proteins.

The Xiao lab employed a mutant amber stop codon to encode the desired sulfotransferase, resulting in a completely autonomous mammalian cell line capable of biosynthesizing sTyr and incorporating it with great precision into proteins.

These engineered cells, the authors wrote, can produce “site-specifically sulfated proteins at a higher yield than cells fed exogenously with the highest level of sTyr reported in the literature.” They used the cells to prepare highly potent thrombin inhibitors with site-specific sulfation.

The word “intriguing” is being used to describe Perseverance results coming from sedimentary rocks on Mars that are of the same type known for preserving fossils and evidence of life here on Earth.

When NASA landed the Perseverance rover on Mars complete with an instrument package capable of identifying organic molecules, the Agency chose the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient water-formed delta dating back 3.5 billion Earth years. The goal was to look for signs of ancient Martians, not the Martians of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” but rather microorganisms like the ones that killed off the Martians after they arrived.

Onboard Perseverance is an instrumentation package that goes by the acronym SHERLOC which stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals. Using SHERLOC, Perseverance has been sampling sedimentary rocks laid down by the water that flowed on the Martian surface earlier in its history.

Continue reading “The Search for Life Off Earth Points to Mars” »

Recent advancements in the development of machine learning and optimization techniques have opened new and exciting possibilities for identifying suitable molecular designs, compounds, and chemical candidates for different applications. Optimization techniques, some of which are based on machine learning algorithms, are powerful tools that can be used to select optimal solutions for a given problem among a typically large set of possibilities.

Researchers at Colorado State University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have been applying state-of-the-art molecular optimization models to different real-world problems that entail identifying new and promising molecular designs. In their most recent study, featured in Nature Machine Intelligence, they specifically applied a newly developed, open-source optimization framework to the task of identifying viable organic radicals for aqueous redox flow batteries, energy devices that convert chemical energy into electricity.

“Our project was funded by an ARPA-E program that was looking to shorten how long it takes to develop new energy materials using machine learning techniques,” Peter C. St. John, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Finding new candidates for redox flow batteries was an interesting extension of some of our previous work, including a paper published in Nature Communications and another in Scientific Data, both looking at organic radicals.”

The research community is excited about the potential of DNA to function as long-term archival storage. That’s largely because it’s extremely dense, chemically stable for tens of thousands of years, and comes in a format we’re unlikely to forget how to read. While there has been some interesting progress, efforts have mostly stayed in the research community because of the high costs and extremely slow read and write speeds. These are problems that need to be solved before DNA-based storage can be practical.

So we were surprised to hear that storage giant Seagate had entered into a collaboration with a DNA-based storage company called Catalog. To find out how close the company’s technology is to being useful, we talked to Catalog’s CEO, Hyunjun Park indicated that Catalog’s approach is counterintuitive on two levels: It doesn’t store data the way you’d expect, and it isn’t focusing on archival storage at all.

Chardan hosted its 4th Annual Chardan Genetic Medicines Conference in October 2020, featuring over 80 public and private companies representing in vivo gene therapy, ex vivo gene therapy, gene editing, RNA medicines, and other subsegments of the genetic medicines space. Among our various panels with preeminent thought leaders, we spoke with newly-minted Nobel laureate, President of the Innovative Genomics Institute, and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and Chemistry at UC Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna.

PhD about open questions and areas of innovation in the CRISPR gene editing space.

Development of medical treatment against cancer is a major research topic worldwide — but cancer often manages to circumvent the solutions found. Scientists around Tanja Weil and David Ng at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P), have now taken a closer look at the cancer’s countermeasures and aim to stop them. By disrupting the cellular components that are responsible for converting oxygen into chemical energy, they have demonstrated initial success in eliminating cells derived from untreatable metastatic cancer.

Treatment of cancer is a long-term process because remnants of living cancer cells often evolve into aggressive forms and become untreatable. Hence, treatment plans often involve multiple drug combinations and/or radiation therapy in order to prevent cancer relapse. To combat the variety of cancer cell types, modern drugs have been developed to target specific biochemical processes that are unique within each cell type.

However, cancer cells are highly adaptive and able to develop mechanisms to avoid the effects of the treatment. “We want to prevent such adaptation by invading the main pillar of cellular life — how cells breathe – that means take up oxygen — and thus produce chemical energy for growth,” says David Ng, group leader at the MPI-P.

If smoke indicates a fire, nitric oxide signals inflammation. The chemical mediator promotes inflammation, but researchers suspect it can do its job too well after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures and related injuries and initiate early onset osteoarthritis. Typically, the degenerative disease is only diagnosed after progressive symptoms, but it potentially could be identified much earlier through nitric oxide monitoring, according to Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, James E. Henderson Jr. Memorial Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State.

Cheng and his student, Shangbin Liu, who earned a master’s degree in engineering science and mechanics at Penn State this year, collaborated with researchers based in China to develop a flexible biosensor capable of continuous and wireless nitric oxide detection in rabbits. They published their approach in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Real-time assessment of biomarkers associated with inflammation, such as nitric oxide in the joint cavity, could indicate pathological evolution at the initial development of osteoarthritis, providing essential information to optimize therapies following traumatic knee injury,” Cheng said.

U.S. and European physicists have demonstrated a new method for predicting whether metallic compounds are likely to host topological states that arise from strong electron interactions.

Physicists from Rice University, leading the research and collaborating with physicists from Stony Brook University, Austria’s Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Spain’s Donostia International Physics Center and Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, unveiled their new design principle in a study published online today in Nature Physics.

The team includes scientists at Rice, TU Wien and Los Alamos who discovered the first strongly correlated topological semimetal in 2017. That system and others the new design principle seeks to identify are broadly sought by the quantum computing industry because topological states have immutable features that cannot be erased or lost to quantum decoherence.