Category Health/Medical

Artist’s rendering of bioreactor (left) loaded with bacteria decorated with cadmium sulfide, light-absorbing nanocrystals (middle) to convert light, water and carbon dioxide into useful chemicals (right). Credit: Kelsey K. Sakimoto

Photosynthesis provides energy for the vast majority of life on Earth. But chlorophyll, the green pigment that plants use to harvest sunlight, is relatively inefficient. To enable humans to capture more of the sun’s energy than natural photosynthesis can, scientists have taught bacteria to cover themselves in tiny, highly efficient solar panels to produce useful compounds. “Rather than rely on inefficient chlorophyll to harvest sunlight, I’ve taught bacteria how to grow and cover their bodies with tiny semiconductor nanocrystals,” says Kelsey K. Sakimoto, Ph.D....

This is a diagram of human-plant-microbe interactions mediated by plant hormones. Credit: Chanclud and Lacombe

A bowl of salad contains more than vitamins and minerals. Plant matter also includes remnants of the hormones plants produce to control how they grow, age, and manage water intake. Recently, scientists have reported that our GI microbes and cells may respond to these hormones and even produce similar molecules of their own “We know that gut microbiota are involved in human diseases, and that microbes can biosynthesize plant hormones that affect humans, so it makes sense to investigate animal-microbe interactions from the perspective of plants,” says Benoît Lacombe of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

For instance, gut microbes and dietary factors have been ti...

Overview of modeling intestinal tubules in the OrganoPlate platform with 40 microfluidic channel networks and 384-well plate format device.
Bottom right: 3D artist impression of the center of a chip comprising a tubule, an extra cellular matrix gel and a perfusion lane; two phaseguides (white bars) are present that define the three distinct lanes in the central channel. The tubule has a lumen at its apical side that is perfused.

Research conducted at Leiden has established that guts-on-chips respond in the same way to aspirin as real human organs do. This is a sign that these model organs are good predictors of the effect of medical drugs on the human body...

Astronauts could someday benefit from recycling human waste on long space trips using a yeast and  a carbon fixing cyanobacteria or algae
Credit: American Chemical Society

Imagine you’re on your way to Mars, and you lose a crucial tool during a spacewalk. Not to worry, you’ll simply re-enter your spacecraft and use some microorganisms to convert your urine and exhaled CO2 into chemicals to make a new one. That’s one of the ultimate goals of scientists who are developing ways to make long space trips feasible. Astronauts can’t take a lot of spare parts into space because every extra ounce adds to the cost of fuel needed to escape Earth’s gravity...