Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

DNA-Based Nanodevices for Molecular Medicine

A new article discusses how DNA molecules can be assembled into tailored and complex nanostructures, and further, how these structures can find uses in therapeutics and bionanotechnological applications. The researchers outline the superior properties of DNA nanostructures. Moreover, these DNA nanostructures provide new applications in molecular medicine, such as novel approaches in tackling cancer. Tailored DNA structures could find targeted cells and release their molecular payload selectively into the cells.

The big boom in the field of structural DNA nanotechnology happened in 2006, when Paul Rothemund introduced a technique dubbed ‘DNA origami’...

Researchers have developed a method for synthesising organic molecules very selectively, by assembling simple molecules and using an enzyme from E. coli (FSA: D-fructose-6-phosphate aldolase), which acts as a biocatalyst.

This is a significant step forward since it replicates the formation of carbohydrates in conditions resembling those that presumably initiated life on the Earth (prebiotic conditions) and because it allows relatively large organic molecules to be obtained very selectively and efficiently. Furthermore, it is a process with few steps, that does not use organic solvents and generates no waste, and it has great potential in chemistry, especially for obtaining molecules and active ingredients of interest (drugs, supplements, etc.).

Prof...

Interfacial functionalization steps.

An international team has succeeded in considerably increasing the efficiency for direct solar water splitting with a tandem solar cell whose surfaces have been selectively modified. The new record tops the previous 12.4%. Until now, manufacturing of solar hydrogen at the industrial level has failed due to the costs, however. This is because the efficiency of artificial photosynthesis, i.e. the energy content of the hydrogen compared to that of sunlight, has simply been too low to produce hydrogen from the sun economically.

Matthias May at TU Ilmenau and the HZB Institute for Solar Fuels, processed and surveyed about one hundred samples in his excellent doctoral dissertation to achieve this...

The smell of electrical discharge after photocopying is a tell-tale sign of ozone in the air. Ozone is a component of ‘smog’ and on hot sunny days, in cities with high traffic volumes, more ozone is formed. New research by scientists at Universities of Melbourne and Wollongong and QUT has provided a 1st glimpse at how free radical damage might be initiated in the human lung upon exposure to the urban air pollutant ozone.

They used a powerful combination of electrospray ionisation coupled with multistage mass spectrometry experiments to shed light on how radicals are formed in the reactions of ozone with models of lung proteins.
The team studied how the deprotonated form of the amino acid cysteine and related amino acids and peptides react with ozone when isolated under idealized near...