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IMAGE: A fungal cell (green) interacting with a nanothin layer of black phosphorous (red). Image magnified 25,000 times. view more
Credit: RMIT University
Researchers have developed a new superbug-destroying coating that could be used on wound dressings and implants to prevent and treat potentially deadly bacterial and fungal infections.
The material is one of the thinnest antimicrobial coatings developed to date and is effective against a broad range of drug-resistant bacteria and fungal cells, while leaving human cells unharmed.
Antibiotic resistance is a major global health threat, causing at least 700,000 deaths a year. Without the development of new antibacterial therapies, the death toll could rise to 10 million people a year by 2050, equating to $US100 trillion in health care costs.
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IMAGE: Figure. (A) Schematic illustration of the centrifugal multispinning polymer nanofiber production process. (B) The polymer nanofibers spun by the system. The increase of the number of sub-disk shows the proportional. view more
Credit: Professor Do Hyun Kim, KAIST
KAIST researchers have developed a novel nanofiber production technique called centrifugal multispinning that will open the door for the safe and cost-effective mass production of high-performance polymer nanofibers. This new technique, which has shown up to a 300 times higher nanofiber production rate per hour than that of the conventional electrospinning method, has many potential applications including the development of face mask filters for coronavirus protection.
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IMAGE: Using EMBL Hamburg s world-class beamline P12 at DESY s PETRA III synchrotron, researchers directed powerful X-ray beams at artificial proteins called coiled-coil origami proteins. view more
Credit: Credit: Fabio Lapenta / National Institute of Chemistry, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Origami may sound more like art than science, but a complex folding pathway that proteins use to determine their shape has been harnessed by molecular biologists, enabling them to build some of the most complex synthetic protein nanostructures to date.
Using EMBL Hamburg s world-class beamline P12 at DESY s PETRA III synchrotron, a team of Slovenian researchers, in collaboration with EMBL s Svergun group, directed powerful X-ray beams at artificial proteins called coiled-coil origami. The proteins were designed to fold into a particular shape based on short modules that interact in pairs. By determining their molecular structure at the EMBL beamline, the researchers confirmed that the
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IMAGE: Gang Fang, PhD, Associate Professor, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai view more
Credit: Mount Sinai Health System
Journal Name:
Nature Methods
Title of the Article: Discovering multiple types of DNA methylation from individual bacteria and microbiome using nanopore sequencing
Corresponding Author: Gang Fang, PhD
Bottom Line:
Bacterial DNA methylation occurs at diverse sequence contexts and plays important functional roles in cellular defense and gene regulation. An increasing number of studies have reported that bacterial DNA methylation has important roles affecting clinically relevant phenotypes such as virulence, host colonization, sporulation, biofilm formation, among others.
Credit: Weiyue Xin of Santore lab.
AMHERST, Mass. - A team of polymer science and engineering researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has demonstrated for the first time that the positions of tiny, flat, solid objects integrated in nanometrically thin membranes - resembling those of biological cells - can be controlled by mechanically varying the elastic forces in the membrane itself. This research milestone is a significant step toward the goal of creating ultrathin flexible materials that self-organize and respond immediately to mechanical force.
The team has discovered that rigid solid plates in biomimetic fluid membranes experience interactions that are qualitatively different from those of biological components in cell membranes. In cell membranes, fluid domains or adherent viruses experience either attractions or repulsions, but not both, says Weiyue Xin, lead author of the paper detailing the research, which recently appeared in