Category Biology/Biotechnology

Biomedical engineers at UC Davis have created that mimic some of the properties of living cells. The artificial cells do not grow and divide, but could detect, react to and destroy bacteria in a lab dish.
Credit: Cheemeng Tan, UC Davis

“Lego block” artificial cells that can kill bacteria have been created by researchers at the University of California, Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering. The work is reported Aug. 29 in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. “We engineered artificial cells from the bottom-up – like Lego blocks – to destroy bacteria,” said Assistant Professor Cheemeng Tan, who led the work. The cells are built from liposomes, or bubbles with a cell-like lipid membrane, and purified cellular components including proteins, DNA and metabolites.

“We demonstrate...

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Or both?
Credit: © olhastock / Fotolia

The “chicken or egg” paradox was first proposed by philosophers in Ancient Greece to describe the problem of determining cause-and-effect. Now, a team of physicists from The University of Queensland and the NÉEL Institute has shown that, as far as quantum physics is concerned, the chicken and the egg can both come first.

Dr Jacqui Romero from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems said that in quantum physics, cause-and-effect is not always as straightforward as one event causing another. “The weirdness of quantum mechanics means that events can happen without a set order,” she said. “Take the example of your daily trip to work, where you travel partly by bus and partly by train...

Myocardial Infarction Produces Sustained Proinflammatory Endothelial Activation in Remote Arteries

Cells and platelets stick inside arteries, increase risk after initial attack. Doctors have long known that in the months after a heart attack or stroke, patients are more likely to have another attack or stroke. Now, a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology explains what happens inside blood vessels to increase risk – and suggests a new way to treat it.

Heart attacks in mice caused inflammatory cells and platelets to more easily stick to the inner lining of arteries throughout the body – and particularly where there was already plaque, according to the paper...

Researchers have designed a synthetic small protein that wraps around a metal core composed of iron and sulfur. This protein can be repeatedly charged and discharged, allowing it to shuttle electrons within a cell. Such peptides may have existed at the dawn of life, moving electrons in early metabolic cycles.
Image: Vikas Nanda

The primordial peptide may have appeared 4 billion years ago. How did life arise on Earth? Rutgers researchers have found among the first and perhaps only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts – essential for cells, the building blocks of life, to function – may have existed when life began. Their study of a primordial peptide, or short protein, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chemist Günter W...