Press monitoring
Movable cytoskeleton membrane fabricated for first time
5.9.2014 | Press monitoring
Cells are complex objects with a sophisticated metabolic system. Their evolutionary ancestors, the primordial cells, were merely composed of a membrane and a few molecules. These were minimalistic yet perfectly functioning systems. Thus, "back to the origins of the cell" became the motto of the group of TUM-Prof. Andreas Bausch, who is member...
Tiny buckybombs could make bacteria explode
4.9.2014 | Press monitoring
Trying to fight off a virus army? Nanoscale explosives made from spherical carbon molecules could be the answer. Buckyballs, made from 60 carbon atoms arranged like a football, are usually stable. But Vitaly Chaban of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and his colleagues suspected that adding common explosive ingredients like nitrates...
Nanoscale assembly line: Nanoscale production line for assembly of biological molecules
3.9.2014 | Press monitoring
Cars, planes and many electronic products are now built with the help of sophisticated assembly lines. Mobile assembly carriers, on to which the objects are fixed, are an important part of these assembly lines. In the case of a car body, the assembly components are attached in various work stages arranged in a precise spatial and chronological...
Synthetic virus developed to deliver a new generation of medicines
2.9.2014 | Press monitoring
Researchers at the universities of Wageningen, Eindhoven, Leiden and Nijmegen have developed a synthetic virus. This can be used in the future to 'package' new generations of medicines consisting of large biomolecules and to deliver them into diseased cells, by a natural process. New types of medicines consist of large biomolecules such as DNA...
Synthesis produces new fungus-derived antibiotic
1.9.2014 | Press monitoring
A fortuitous collaboration at Rice University has led to the total synthesis of a recently discovered natural antibiotic. The laboratory recreation of a fungus-derived antibiotic, viridicatumtoxin B, may someday help bolster the fight against bacteria that evolve resistance to treatments in hospitals and clinics around the world. As part of the...
Taming of the bunny rewrote rabbit genome
29.8.2014 | Press monitoring
Pet rabbits will happily sit in their owner's lap, but wild rabbits are famously timid, fleeing at the slightest hint of a human, let alone a fox or hawk. This tolerance for human company was only bred into bunnies recently: about 1400 years ago in southern France. But it was not clear how this worked at the genetic level. Did domestication make...
New cancer-hunting nano-robots to seek and destroy tumours
28.8.2014 | Press monitoring
It sounds like a scene from a science fiction novel – an army of tiny weaponised robots travelling around a human body, hunting down malignant tumours and destroying them from within. But research in Nature Communications today from the University of California Davis Cancer Centre shows the prospect of that being a realistic scenario may not be...
Modified yeast makes opiates for the first time
27.8.2014 | Press monitoring
Severe pain? Reach for the yeast. Genetically engineered yeasts can now efficiently produce a range of opiates, including morphine and oxycodone. With growing anxieties about supplies of opium poppies, it could be just what the doctor ordered. Opiates are primarily used as painkillers and cough suppressants, and many of the most widely used...
New material could enhance fast, accurate DNA sequencing
26.8.2014 | Press monitoring
Gene-based personalized medicine has many possibilities for diagnosis and targeted therapy, but one big bottleneck: the expensive and time-consuming DNA-sequencing process. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found that nanopores in the material molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) could sequence DNA more accurately,...
Attack Ebola on a nanoscale
25.8.2014 | Press monitoring
The Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa has claimed more than 900 lives since February and has infected thousands more. Countries such as Nigeria and Liberia have declared health emergencies. There is no known vaccine, treatment, or cure for Ebola, which is contracted through the bodily fluids of an infected person or animal. But that doesn't...
