News by Subject Technology & Engineering

The discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is made by a jellyfish, transformed cell biology. It allowed scientists to stitch the GFP sequence to proteins from other organisms to trace their movements and interactions in living cells. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have designed peptide nanoparticles that can each glow in a variety of colors, opening the door for many new biomedical applications.

A method to extract carbohydrates and phycobiliproteins from algae was developed that does not kill the algae during harvest or rely on solvents for extraction and purification. This novel method uses mechanical shearing to 'milk' the desired compounds, greatly reducing the production cost of algae-derived compounds.

Aortic valve stenosis is the most common type of heart valve disease in the elderly and affects more than one in eight people aged over 75. Researchers used organ-on-a-chip technology to discover the disease is made worse by the damaging hyperactivity of immune cells, which are activated by the constant stress of squeezing through the narrow aortic valve.

Researchers of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) recently uncovered novel molecular mechanisms that regulate delivery of a planar cell polarity protein, Frizzled-6, to the cell surface. This finding provides important information to guide the rational design of inhibitors to downregulate planar cell polarity pathway for cancer treatment.

A research team in Japan reported that they succeeded in producing the spider silk -- ultra-lightweight, though, biodegradable and biocompatible material -- using photosynthetic bacteria. This study will open a new era in which bio-factories stably output the bulk of spider silk.