Study of Ancient Proteins Clarifies Mystery of Crocodiles’ Unique Hemoglobin
Experiments on ancient proteins reveal that mutations are more numerous and nuanced than previously believed. It can pogo-stick along at 50-plus miles per hour, leaping…
Chemical Biology News
Scientists Discover Enzyme That Can Turn Poison Into Food
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology have uncovered how a methane-producing microbe thrives on toxic sulfite without becoming poisoned. Methanogens are tiny…
Powerful New Drug Could Cause COVID-19 To Turn on Itself
The Scripps Research team demonstrated that a variant of an existing FDA-approved treatment for neurological disorders may prevent COVID-19 infection in animals. Scientists at Scripps…
Cheap Fluorescent Compounds That Can Help Treat Cancer
Researchers have created low-cost substances for tumor therapy and diagnosis. Researchers from the Ural Federal University and the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of…
Complicating the Opioid Epidemic: Scientists Estimate Fentanyl Has Hundreds of Millions of Chemical Variants
Expanded library of known variants, new research efforts aid the fight against fentanyl. While COVID-19 has dominated the news for the last two years, a…
Disgusting Biodiversity: The Surprising Structural Reason Your Kitchen Sponge Is a Bacterial Incubator
Environmental structure affects interactions between microbial species, making the common kitchen sponge a better incubator for bacterial diversity than a laboratory Petri dish. Researchers at…
Neural Implants and the Future of Mind Control
Why neuron-like implants could offer a better way to treat Alzheimer’s disease or post-traumatic stress disorder, control prosthetics, or even enhance cognitive abilities. Recently, Charles…
New Achievement Could Lead to More-Efficient Quantum Computing
In terms of size, it may be the smallest scientific breakthrough ever made at Harvard. Harvard Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Kang-Kuen Ni…
Fungal Enzymes Could Potential Convert Wood Biomass Into Biofuels
An international team of researchers, including scientists from the University of York, has discovered a set of enzymes found in fungi that are capable of…
Chemists Reveal New Theory For How Life On Earth May Have Begun
Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a fascinating new theory for how life on Earth may have begun. Their experiments, described today…
Engineered Synthetic Scaffolds Mark a New Era in Cellular Design
Researchers at the universities of Kent and Bristol have built a miniature scaffold inside bacteria that can be used to bolster cellular productivity, with implications…
Gut Microbes Can Consume Enough of a Key Nutrient to Cause a Deficiency
A new study reveals that under certain conditions gut microbes can consume enough of a key nutrient to cause a deficiency in their hosts. For…
Scientists Develop “Kill Switches” for Engineered Bacteria
To prevent genetically modified bacteria from escaping into the wider environment, MIT researchers have developed safeguards in the form of two so-called “kill switches,” which…
Scientists Provide Novel Tools to Study Enzyme Catalysis
A newly published study details how scientists used a chemical probe to dissect individual catalytic steps of enoyl-thioester reductases, validating an active site tyrosine as…
Artificial Enzyme Reveals Never Before Seen Structure
A newly published study details how researchers turned an ordinary protein into an artificial enzyme, a biological catalyst capable of joining two segments of RNA….
MALBAC Offers More Efficient Way to Sequence DNA
Sequencing DNA is nothing new, but it’s much harder to sequence the DNA of a single cell. In order to get enough DNA for sequencing,…
