#Fireflies shed light on the function of mitochondria

“#Fireflies shed light on the function of mitochondria” Credit: CC0 Public Domain Tiny factories float inside our cells and provide them with almost all the energy they need: the mitochondria. Their effectiveness decreases when we get older, but also when we face many diseases such as diabetes, cancer or Parkinson’s. This is why scientists are…

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#New process fast-tracks drug treatments for viral infections and cancer

“#New process fast-tracks drug treatments for viral infections and cancer” Credit: Simon Fraser University Discovering antiviral and anticancer drugs will soon be faster and cheaper thanks to new research from Simon Fraser University chemist Robert Britton and his international team. For the past 50 years, scientists have used manmade, synthetic and nucleoside analogues to create…

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#Origins of life: Chemical evolution in a tiny Gulf Stream

“#Origins of life: Chemical evolution in a tiny Gulf Stream” Hot fluids meet a cold sea: Local temperature gradients in porous volcanic rock on the early Earth could have facilitated the self-replication of RNA strands. Credit: Picture Alliance Chemical reactions driven by the geological conditions on the early Earth might have led to the prebiotic…

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#Team develops peptide that makes drug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again

“#Team develops peptide that makes drug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again” The improved potency of the antimicrobial peptide when used with antibiotics offers hope for the prospect of a combination treatment strategy to tackle certain antibiotic-tolerant infections. Credit: NTU Singapore Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a synthetic peptide that can…

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#Poison control: Chasing the antidote

“#Poison control: Chasing the antidote” A fast-acting antidote to mitigate the effects of organophosphate poisoning requires a reactivator that can effectively and efficiently cross the blood-brain barrier, bind loosely to the enzyme, chemically snatch the poison and then leave quickly. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is using neutron diffraction data towards improving a novel reactivator design….

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#Researchers use Theta for real-time analysis of COVID-19 proteins

“#Researchers use Theta for real-time analysis of COVID-19 proteins” Nsp10/16 surface with ligands. Researchers have developed a pipeline to connect ALCF supercomputers to APS experiments to enable real-time analysis of COVID-19 proteins, paving the way to elucidate important protein structural dynamics of the coronavirus. Credit: Mateusz Wilamowski, University of Chicago, Center for Structural Genomics of…

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#Compressive shearing may start life on other planets

“#Compressive shearing may start life on other planets” A new computational model of rotational diamond anvil cell experiments predicts that compressive shearing forces exerted by the tidal pull of Jovian planets on moons like Europa and Enceladus may form a natural reactor for prebiotic chemistry in their rocky ice-covered crusts. Credit: Veronica Chen/LLNL Massive compressive…

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#Anatomy of an acne treatment

“#Anatomy of an acne treatment” Credit: CC0 Public Domain Sarecycline, a drug approved for use in the United States in 2018, is the first new antibiotic approved to treat acne in more than 40 years. Now, researchers at Yale and the University of Illinois-Chicago have discovered how its unique chemical structure makes it effective. Their…

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