Sustainable plastics from agricultural waste

The production of these materials is now being scaled up by the EPFL spin-off, Bloom Biorenewables, in an effort to get them into the market

19-Mar-2024 - In our rapidly industrialized world, the quest for sustainable materials has never been more urgent. Plastics, ubiquitous in daily life, pose significant environmental challenges, primarily due to their fossil fuel origins and problematic disposal. Now, a study led by Jeremy Luterbacher's team at ...

Oral peptides: A new era in drug development

The research opens the door to a new class of orally available drugs, addressing a long-standing challenge in the pharmaceutical industry

10-Jan-2024 - For decades, a substantial number of proteins, vital for treating various diseases, have remained elusive to oral drug therapy. Traditional small molecules often struggle to bind to proteins with flat surfaces or require specificity for particular protein homologs. Typically, larger biologics ...

Anti-Aging for the brain? A recent study provides new insights into age-related changes in the brain

Important signalling pathway in brain aging identified

09-Aug-2023 - A landmark study published on 2nd August 2023 in the journal Nature provides new insights into aging processes in the brain and potential targets for combating age-related neurodegenerative diseases. The research team, led by Prof. Andrea Ablasser from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne ...

Extreme DNA resolution: Researchers slow down and scan multiple times individual DNA molecules

Researchers have achieved near-perfect control over the manipulation of individual molecules, allowing them to be identified and characterized with unprecedented precision

30-Jun-2023 - Aleksandra Radenovic, head of theLaboratory of Nanoscale Biologyin the School of Engineering, has worked for years to improve nanopore technology, which involves passing a molecule like DNA through a tiny pore in a membrane to measure an ionic current. Scientists can determine DNA’s sequence of ...

Monitoring gene activities in living cells

Cell Biopsy instead of cell lysis

19-Aug-2022 - Researchers from ETH Zurich and EPFL are expanding the emerging field of single-​cell analysis with a ground-​breaking method: Live-​seq makes it possible to measure the activity of thousands of genes in a single cell without having to isolate and destroy it. Modern biology is increasingly ...

New PET-like plastic made directly from waste biomass

“We essentially just ‘cook’ wood or other non-edible plant material, such as agricultural wastes, in inexpensive chemicals to produce the plastic precursor in one step”

28-Jun-2022 - It is becoming increasingly obvious that moving away from fossil fuels and avoiding the accumulation of plastics in the environment are key to addressing the challenge of climate change. In that vein, there are considerable efforts to develop degradable or recyclable polymers made from non-edible ...

Tracking chirality in real time

“These ground-breaking experiments show that time-resolved circular dichroism is uniquely suited to capture the molecular motion that drives many (bio)chemical processes”

01-Jun-2022 - Scientists at EPFL have developed a new laser-based technique that can measure ultrafast changes in the structural symmetry of molecules, called chirality, tracking their conformational shifts in real time. In a collaboration with researchers from the Universities of Geneva and Pisa, the ...

Designing vaccines from artificial proteins

De novo protein design enables the precise induction of RSV-neutralizing antibodies

18-May-2020 - Vaccines are one of the most effective interventions to prevent the spreading of infectious diseases. They trigger the immune system to produce antibodies that protect us against infection. However, we still lack efficacious vaccines for many important pathogens, like the flu or dengue fever. ...

Emergence of calorie burning fat cells

A new approach to treating overweight and obesity

10-Jan-2020 - 1.9 billion people in the world are overweight. Of these, 650 million people are obese, which increases the risk of secondary diseases such as high blood pressure or cancer. Professor Martin Klingenspor and his team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) examine how our fat metabolism ...

Predicting a protein's behavior from its appearance

11-Dec-2019 - Proteins are the building blocks of life and play a key role in all biological processes. Understanding how they interact with their environment is therefore vital to developing effective therapeutics and the foundation for designing artificial cells. Researchers at the Laboratory of Protein ...