The discovery of how a critical enzyme "hidden in nature's blueprint" works sheds new light on how cells control key processes in carbon fixation, a process fundamental for life on Earth ..read more

Life has transformed our world over billions of years, turning a dead rock into the lush, fertile planet we know today. But human activity is currently transforming Earth again, this time by releasing greenhouse gases that are driving dramatic changes in our climate ..read more

Sustainable aviation fuels made from renewable sources of carbon could reduce carbon dioxide emissions and help to mitigate climate change. Isoprenol is a chemical involved in the production of a jet biofuel blendstock called 1,4-dimethylcyclooctane (DMCO). Blendstocks are chemicals that are combined with other chemicals to create fuel. Researchers have produced isoprenol in several microbial hosts ..read more

Nature consistently inspires engineering applications. Recently, a group of researchers from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) drew new inspiration from the vascular network and developed a new type of fluidic system named VasFluidics ..read more

A combined team of medical researchers and AI systems specialists from Google's Deep Mind project and Isomorphic Labs, both in London, has made what the group describes as substantial improvements to AlphaFold 2 that make it possible for the application to predict the structure of a wide variety of biomolecular systems more broadly and accurately. The new iteration is called AlphaFold 3 ..read more

Vaccines save lives, as proven during the recent pandemic, but one component of most vaccines—including the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine—goes unheralded: a molecule or other compound that primes the immune system to mount a more robust defense against infection ..read more

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet, together with Pixelgen Technologies, have developed and applied a technique that makes it possible to map proteins in individual cells in a completely new way. Not only is it now possible to measure the amount of proteins, but also how they are distributed in the cell's membrane and how they interact with each other ..read more

Cellulose, which helps give plant cell walls their rigid structure, holds promise as a renewable raw material for biofuels—if researchers can accelerate the production process. Compared to the breakdown of other biofuel materials like corn, breaking down cellulose is slow and inefficient but could avoid concerns around using a food source while taking advantage of abundant plant materials that might otherwise go to waste. New research led by Penn State investigators has revealed how several molecular roadblocks slow this process ..read more

Since their discovery, researchers have repeatedly demonstrated the potential medical applications of differentiated cells and tissues generated from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. However, a significant hurdle to real-world medical applications is related to the substrate used to culture and induce iPS cells into differentiated cell types ..read more

Swedish researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg have developed an AI method that improves the identification of toxic chemicals—based solely on knowledge of the molecular structure ..read more