A taste for plastic

Discovered for the first time: New deep-sea enzyme breaks down PET plastic

27-Sep-2023 - Plastic pollution is increasingly affecting the health of coasts and oceans. One well-known problem is plastic bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. A new study involving scientists from Professor Ruth Schmitz-Streit's research group at Kiel University has shown for the first ...

Reducing the carbon footprint of methane by converting it into methanol with a new enzyme

18-Sep-2023 - A team led by Professor Osami Shoji at Nagoya University in Japan has developed a technology to convert methane, the principal component of natural gas, into methanol at room temperature in water. They used an enzyme that can be easily mass-produced, offering the possibility of a cheap and ...

Innovative biocatalysts reduce pharmaceutical residues in wastewater

In a new interdisciplinary project, researchers are investigating the use of novel enzymes to remove micropollutants from municipal wastewater

12-Sep-2023 - Medicines are good for our bodies. However, depending on the type of drug, up to 90 percent of the active ingredient is excreted unchanged and thus ends up in wastewater. Improper disposal of pharmaceutical products in toilets and washbasins also leads to residues that can only be partially ...

Biolab Products Replacing Horseradish Roots

Breakthrough in the production of important enzymes: Previously they were extracted from horseradish roots, but now they can be produced recombinantly in the laboratory

01-Sep-2023 - It is one of the most important enzymes in medical diagnostics: Horseradish peroxidase is used for many medical products - it is often used when a color change of a test strip is to detect the presence of antibodies or other proteins. Recently, however, there has been a shortage of horseradish ...

Mysthera Therapeutics Launches to Develop First-in-Class Autoimmune Disease Therapies

Seed Capital from Forty51 Ventures to Advance Pipeline of Pan-PIM Kinase Inhibitors

28-Aug-2023 - Mysthera Therapeutics AG, a company developing first-in-class, oral therapeutics to treat complex autoimmune diseases, launched with $3.5 million seed capital from founding investor Forty51 Ventures. The capital will be used to advance its portfolio of pre-clinical stage, pan-PIM kinase ...

On-off Switch for Enzymes

Researchers at TU Graz have gained new insights into the functioning of a protein found in bacteria, whose enzymatic activity is activated by blue light.

07-Aug-2023 - Light affects living organisms in many different ways: for example, plants orient their growth direction towards the sun, while circadian rhythms in humans are controlled by daylight. These processes always involve photoreceptors, which are proteins that can sense different colours and ...

AI predicts the work rate of enzymes

“TurNuP outperforms previous models and can even be used successfully for enzymes that have only a low similarity to those in the training dataset”

28-Jul-2023 - Enzymes play a key role in cellular metabolic processes. To enable the quantitative assessment of these processes, researchers need to know the so-called “turnover number” (for short: kcat) of the enzymes. In the scientific journal Nature Communications, a team of bioinformaticians from Heinrich ...

Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators 2023 goes to Maurice Michel, Sweden

„These ground-breaking discoveries may have far-reaching applications in the treatment of cancer or age-related degeneration“

27-Jun-2023 - This year, the Hamburg based life sciences company Eppendorf SE is awarding its research prize for the 28th time. The independent jury chaired by Prof. Reinhard Jahn selected Dr. Maurice Michel, Science for Life Laboratory, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden as the winner of the Eppendorf ...

Mix and Match: How a Methanogen creates its own sulfate reduction machinery

Discovery opens up exciting opportunities in biofuel production

08-Jun-2023 - Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, have uncovered the molecular secrets of a methane-generating microbe that can transform sulfate into sulfide – a ready-to-use cellular building block. This discovery opens up exciting opportunities in biofuel ...

AI predicts the function of enzymes

This method offers a wide range of potential applications

22-May-2023 - Enzymes are the molecule factories in biological cells. However, which basic molecular building blocks they use to assemble target molecules is often unknown and difficult to measure. An international team including bioinformaticians from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has now taken ...