Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

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...

An artist’s rendition of the DOTS qPCR device. Credit: Dustin Harshman

Dr’s ability to act quickly and correctly not only makes a difference to the patient’s outcome, it determines whether the infection spreads to other patients in the clinic, and can even contribute to the development of drug-resistant bacteria.

The device’s novel approach to molecular diagnostics, called DOTS qPCR, is faster, more efficient and less expensive than alternatives currently being used in clinics.

Pathogens and infectious diseases are typically detected using a technique called polymerase chain reaction,ie PCR. The method involves rapidly heating and cooling DNA molecules from a biological sample in a process called thermal cycling...

Schematic diagrams showing the synthesis and microstructures of a 3D graphene-RACNT fiber. (A) Aluminum wire. (B) Surface anodized aluminum wire (AAO wire). (C) 3D graphene-RACNT structure on the AAO wire. (D) Schematic representation of the pure 3D graphene-RACNT structure. (E to G) Top view SEM images of the 3D graphene-RACNT fiber at different magnifications. (I to K) SEM images of the cross-section of the 3D graphene-RACNT fiber. (H and L) AFM images of the 3D graphene-RACNT fiber. (M to P) SEM image (M) and corresponding EDX elemental mapping of (N) aluminum, (O) oxygen, and (P) carbon from the 3D graphene-RACNT fiber.

First 1-step process for making seamless carbon-based nanomaterials that possess superior thermal, electrical and mechanical properties in 3 dimensions...

Design strategy of protein-DNA nanowires. The protein-DNA nanowire is self-assembled with a computationally designed protein homodimer and a double-stranded DNA with the protein binding sites properly arranged. Credit: Yun (Kurt) Mou, Jiun-Yann Yu, Timothy M. Wannier, Chin-Lin Guo and Stephen L. Mayo/Caltech

Synthetic structures made of DNA could one day be used to deliver cancer drugs directly to tumor cells, and customized proteins could be designed to specifically attack a certain kind of virus. Although researchers have already made such structures out of DNA or protein alone, a Caltech team recently created- for the first time -a synthetic structure made of both protein and DNA. Combining the two molecule types into one biomaterial opens the door to numerous applications.

“If your mat...