Drug Delivery.
Covid-19
Without these lipid shells, there would be no mRNA vaccines for COVID-19.
Fragile mRNA molecules used in COVID-19 vaccines can’t get into cells on their own. They owe their success to lipid nanoparticles that took decades to refine by.
Ryan Cross
A team of researchers from Verve Therapeutics and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a CRISPR gene-editing technique that lowered the levels of cholesterol in the blood of test monkeys. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe their technique.
Prior research has shown that in some people, the PCSK9 gene codes excess PCSK9 protein production (which occurs mostly in the liver)—leading to an increase in lipoprotein cholesterol levels in the bloodstream. This is because it interferes with blood cells with LDL receptors that “grab” LDL and remove it. For this reason, pharmaceutical companies have developed therapies that reduce the production of PCSK9 protein. However, most do not work well enough, which is why there is still so much atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. In this new effort, the researchers have tried another approach—altering the PCSK9 gene to make it stop coding for PCSK9 protein production.
The approach involved using a base editing technology made up of messenger RNA encoding for an adenine base editor along with guided RNA that was packaged in a lipid nanoparticle. Notably, the base editing technique was able to substitute a single nucleotide with another in the DNA without cutting the double helix. Prior research has shown the technique to be more precise, which means fewer errors than other CRISPR techniques. In their work, the researchers replaced an adenine with a guanine and a thymine with a cytosine, completely incapacitating the gene. Implementation of the therapy involved a one-time injection into the liver of cynomolgus monkeys.
Origin of Information —“Something Very Old, Very Powerful and Very Special has Been Unleashed on Earth” | The Daily Galaxy.
“Humans are strange…We are the aliens,” observes Columbia University astrophysicist, Caleb Scharf, noting that humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. “We also have a truly outsize impact on the planetary environment without much in the way of natural attrition to trim our influence (at least not yet).
Like a Sudden Invasion by Extraterrestrials
But the strangest thing of all, notes Scharf for Scientific American, is how we generate, exploit, and propagate information that is not encoded in our heritable genetic material, yet travels with us through time and space. Not only is much of that information represented in purely symbolic forms—alphabets, languages, binary codes—it is also represented in each brick, alloy, machine, and structure we build from the materials around us. Even the symbolic stuff is housed in some material form or the other, whether as ink on pages or electrical charges in nanoscale pieces of silicon.
New battery cells developed by Australia’s Graphene Manufacturing Group and the University of Queensland are said to charge up to 70 times faster than lithium-ion cells and have triple the battery life.
Atomically thin materials are a promising alternative to silicon-based transistors; now researchers can connect them more efficiently to other chip elements.
Moore’s Law, the famous prediction that the number of transistors that can be packed onto a microchip will double every couple of years, has been bumping into basic physical limits. These limits could bring decades of progress to a halt, unless new approaches are found.
One new direction being explored is the use of atomically thin materials instead of silicon as the basis for new transistors, but connecting those “2D” materials to other conventional electronic components has proved difficult.
The Duke team tested the nanoparticle vaccine by injecting it into macaque monkeys, finding that it provides total protection against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Additionally, the vaccine created antibodies against SARS, bat coronaviruses and the more contagious variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.
May 17—Duke University researchers are developing a vaccine that could provide protection against multiple kinds of coronaviruses, according to a study published last week in Nature, a leading scientific journal. The vaccine, which was developed at Duke’s Human Vaccine Institute, uses nanoparticles to show the immune system 24 copies of a specific part of the virus’ spike protein that attaches to human cells. An additional substance promotes the creation of antibodies that attack that part of the virus.
Influenza, commonly known as the flu virus, places a substantial burden on public health in the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that influenza has resulted in about 9 million to 45 million diseases, 140000 to 810000 hospitalizations, and 12000 to 61000 deaths each year over the past decade.
Though flu vaccines are readily available to the public, they need to be remodeled and administered every year to combat new viral variants, which can undermine vaccine efficacy. Because of this, scientists have aimed to develop a universal vaccine that can protect against all influenza strains, and that can last for many years.
Now, researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) developed a universal flu vaccine candidate using small particles (nanoparticles), which can induce a long-lasting immune response.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in turning specially prepared graphene flakes either into insulators or into superconductors by applying an electric voltage. This technique even works locally, meaning that in the same graphene flake regions with completely different physical properties can be realized side by side.
The production of modern electronic components requires materials with very diverse properties. There are isolators, for instance, which do not conduct electric current, and superconductors which transport it without any losses. To obtain a particular functionality of a component one usually has to join several such materials together. Often that is not easy, in particular when dealing with nanostructures that are in widespread use today.
A team of researchers at ETH Zurich led by Klaus Ensslin and Thomas Ihn at the Laboratory for Solid State Physics have now succeeded in making a material behave alternately as an insulator or as a superconductor – or even as both at different locations in the same material – by simply applying an electric voltage. Their results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology. The work was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research QSIT (Quantum Science and Technology).
Transitioning from fossil fuels to a clean hydrogen economy will require cheaper and more efficient ways to use renewable sources of electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen.
But a key step in that process, known as the oxygen evolution reaction or OER, has proven to be a bottleneck. Today it’s only about 75% efficient, and the precious metal catalysts used to accelerate the reaction, like platinum and iridium, are rare and expensive.
Now an international team led by scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has developed a suite of advanced tools to break through this bottleneck and improve other energy-related processes, such as finding ways to make lithium-ion batteries charge faster. The research team described their work in Nature today.
In work that could someday turn cell phones into sensors capable of detecting viruses and other minuscule objects, MIT researchers have built a powerful nanoscale flashlight on a chip.
Their approach to designing the tiny light beam on a chip could also be used to create a variety of other nano flashlights with different beam characteristics for different applications. Think of a wide spotlight versus a beam of light focused on a single point.
For many decades, scientists have used light to identify a material by observing how that light interacts with the material. They do so by essentially shining a beam of light on the material, then analyzing that light after it passes through the material. Because all materials interact with light differently, an analysis of the light that passes through the material provides a kind of “fingerprint” for that material. Imagine doing this for several colors — i.e., several wavelengths of light — and capturing the interaction of light with the material for each color. That would lead to a fingerprint that is even more detailed.
