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Category: chemistry

Feeding data to AI to speed up drug discovery

Developing new medicines can require thousands of chemistry experiments to identify the right recipe for a safe, effective and ideally affordable drug.

The process is slow and labor-intensive, and many of the reactions depend on hard-to-source metals that act as essential catalysts.

While artificial intelligence is helping speed up the process of drug discovery, it can only learn from the data available, and when it comes to chemical reactions, the large, high-quality data sets needed to train powerful AI tools aren’t there.

Faster aptamer screening finds synthetic alternatives to antibodies in days instead of months

Aptamers are short DNA or RNA strands that can recognize and bind to a specific target molecule with high precision. Similar to antibodies, they can be used to detect these molecules or modulate their activity. Unlike antibodies, they are much more stable, can be produced synthetically and can be chemically modified to achieve the desired properties. As a result, they can offer capabilities that cannot be achieved with antibodies.

As demand grows for accurate and rapid diagnostic tools, aptamers are often better suited to these applications than antibodies. However, developing aptamers is both experimentally demanding and time-consuming. A team of scientists from IOCB Prague, led by Dr. Marek Ondruš and Prof. Michal Hocek, has now developed a technology that significantly shortens the development process. Their research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

15-atom Iridium Nanoclusters Stay Stable 20 Hours, Outperform Commercial Catalysts

An international research team from Tohoku University, Tokyo University of Science, Vanderbilt University and the University of Adelaide has discovered a novel, exceptionally simple method to precisely synthesize extremely small iridium nanoclusters in ambient air. Such a feat was previously considered highly challenging. In addition, the nanoclusters outperform conventional, commercially available iridium catalysts by 1.5 times in mass activity, while maintaining sustained operational stability without degradation for more than 20 hours.

This breakthrough could result in improved production of green hydrogen, which is considered the ultimate clean fuel. The findings were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The Oxygen Evolution Reaction (OER) can create green hydrogen, but the reaction requires so much energy that producing green hydrogen efficiently is a huge challenge. Furthermore, because the reaction takes place in a highly corrosive, strongly acidic environment, iridium (Ir) is virtually the only rare and expensive catalyst capable of enduring it.

Social Determinants of Health and Neurobiology Across the Schizophrenia Course: A Systematic Review

This systematic review examines structural, functional, neurochemical, and plasticity brain changes associated with social determinants of health in individuals with, or at risk for, schizophrenia-spectrum psychotic conditions.

Gene tied to energy production in brain could lead to new treatment for cognitive disorders

Researchers in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo have discovered a connection between a specific gene and healthy brain function. “The hope is that this discovery could eventually lead to expanded treatment for psychiatric and neurological disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism,” explains Mikhail V. Pletnikov, MD, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, the senior author of the study with Kateryna (Kate) Murlanova, Ph.D., the first lead author and a research scientist in the department.

They discovered that the NPAS3 gene expressed in astrocytes—the cells that help with brain chemistry—regulates the energy production required to support thinking and memory. NPAS3 is a transcription factor, which means it directs how certain genes work and influences how cells function. Their findings are published in Science Advances.

“Previous studies have linked NPAS3 to conditions involving cognitive problems, such as schizophrenia, but scientists didn’t know exactly how it might be involved,” Pletnikov says.

Brain enzyme caught doing something unexpected—it builds polysialic acid on itself

A chance discovery at Nagoya University in Japan has shown that a well-known brain enzyme has a hidden ability: It builds a sugar chain on itself, becomes secreted from the cell and deactivates, then switches on outside the cell once the chain is removed. The finding, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, overturns a decades-old assumption about how polysialic acid, a sugar chain critical for brain development and function, is produced and shows a new way an enzyme can regulate its own activity.

The human brain is covered in sugar chains, or glycans, molecular structures that coat cells and regulate how they communicate. One of the most important is polysialic acid, a long chain found mainly in the brain.

Polysialic acid keeps brain cells from adhering too tightly to each other and binds to growth factors and neurotrophins to regulate the presentation of their receptors. Through this, it plays a key role in learning, memory and neural development. Importantly, these sugar chains change rapidly in response to brain activity. The ability to restore them quickly is thought to be essential for normal brain function.

Diamond-based particle detector captures one-picosecond electron bursts for high-rate beam diagnostics

Physicists at UC Santa Cruz and other institutes across California and New Mexico have developed a detection system that will allow next-generation particle accelerators to better reveal fundamental biological and chemical processes, as well as advance critical areas such as materials science and energy research.

The Advanced Accelerator Diagnostics Collaboration, a group of two University of California campuses and three U.S. national laboratories, came together to solve a growing need for high-rate beam diagnostics. These accelerators will now jump from 120 pulses a second to 1 million pulses a second, straining current beam diagnostic systems. The results are now published in the journal Physical Review Accelerators and Beams.

“It really highlights the power of collaboration between universities and national laboratories,” said Bruce Schumm, the Long Family Professor of Experimental Physics. “If you took away Lawrence Berkeley Lab, if you took away Los Alamos, if you took away UC Davis, any of those, the whole thing would have fallen apart.”

How to train your magnet: Excitons as a new knob for magnetic control

Scientists can learn a lot about a quantum material by watching how it responds to light. In magnetic semiconductors, one especially useful messenger is the exciton: a pairing of a negatively charged electron and the positively charged “hole” it leaves behind. Until now, excitons in magnetic materials have mostly been used as reporters. They could reveal how spins were arranged or how magnetic waves moved through a material. But Cornell researchers have shown that excitons can do more than observe magnetism. They can actively steer it.

In the paper “Excitonic Spin Torque in a Magnetic Semiconductor,” published June 15 in Nature Materials, Youn Jue (Eunice) Bae, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues report that excitons created by light can exert a spin torque in the two-dimensional magnetic semiconductor chromium sulfide bromide, or CrSBr. The finding establishes excitons as a new way to control magnetic motion with light.

“Excitons have been very useful for watching what spins are doing in magnetic materials,” Bae said. “What we show here is that excitons can also act back on the spins. They are not just spectators; they can help drive the magnetic motion.”

Reversible chirality switching in MoS₂ generates spin currents without magnets

A newly developed method allows researchers to dynamically switch chirality—a particular lack of mirror symmetry—to generate spin currents in semiconductors, researchers from Science Tokyo report. Their approach relies on the reversible insertion and removal of small chiral molecules from the interlayer gaps of a layered, nonchiral semiconductor material using electrochemistry.

The findings could pave the way for the development of novel chiral spintronic materials and technologies that do not rely on magnets or magnetic fields.

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