Latest News Releases 16 April

In a paper published in National Science Review, a research team from Peking University presents new insights into magnetic field sensing. The study investigates the limits of quantum magnetometers and explores criteria for determining whether a magnetometer is essentially quantum.

In an original research article published in MedComm - Oncology, an antiallergic drug fexofenadine was identified as a new Met inhibitory agent by a computational drug repurposing tool called “DRAR-CPI” via chemical-protein interactome analysis of known Met inhibitors. Fexofenadine was shown to overcome osimertinib resistance in non-small cell lung cancer by inhibiting Met in vitro and in vivo.

The team of Professor Heng-Yu Fan from the Life Sciences Institute (LSI) of Zhejiang University (with ph.D. student Yuxuan Jiao as the first author) published a research paper titled “DHX36-mediated G-quadruplexes unwinding is essential for oocyte and early embryo development in mice” in Science Bulletin. This study, for the first time, revealed the spatiotemporal consistency of DHX36 with the formation of G4 structures during mammalian oocyte and early embryo development. DHX36 specifically binds to G4 structures on DNA (particularly in rDNA regions and transcription start sites) and pre-rRNA, thereby regulating chromatin conformation, gene transcription, and pre-rRNA processing, which are essential for maintaining normal oocyte and embryo development.

Conventional thinking holds that the metal site in single atom catalysts (SACs) has been a limiting factor to the continued improvement of the design and, therefore, the continued improvement of the capability of these SACs. More specifically, the lack of outside-the-box thinking when it comes to the crucial hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), a half-reaction resulting in the splitting of water, has contributed to a lack of advancement in this field. New

research emphasizes the importance of pushing the limits of the metal site design in SACs to optimize the HER and addressing the poisoning effects of HO* and O* that might affect the reaction. All of these improvements could lead to an improved performance of the reaction, which can make sustainable energy storage or hydrogen production more available.

This work presents an energy-efficient classical simulation algorithm using GPUs that outperforms Google's Sycamore processor in speed and energy consumption, challenging the claim of quantum computational advantage.

In a recent study, an international team of physicists, led by Prof. JO Gyu-Boong from the Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has made a significant observation of the BKT phase transition in a 2D dipolar gas of ultracold atoms. This groundbreaking work marks a major milestone in understanding how 2D superfluids behave with long-range and anisotropic dipolar interactions.