Prof. Martin Gijs has been awarded a Proof of Concept ERC Grant. This funding initiative, launched in March 2011, is only open to researchers who have already been awarded an ERC grant. It aims at establishing the innovation potential of ideas arising from the ERC-funded frontier research project.
Scientific debate has been hot lately about whether microbial nanowires, the specialized electrical pili of the mud-dwelling anaerobic bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens, truly possess metallic-like conductivity as its discoverers claim. But now University of Massachusetts Amherst microbiologist Derek Lovley, with postdoctoral researcher Nikhil Malvankar and colleagues, say they have settled the dispute between theoretical and experimental scientists by devising a combination of new experiments and better theoretical modeling.
Researchers have long sought an efficient way to untangle DNA in order to study its structure – neatly unraveled and straightened out – under a microscope. Now, chemists and engineers at KU Leuven, in Belgium, have devised a strikingly simple and effective solution: they inject genetic material into a droplet of water and use a pipet tip to drag it over a glass plate covered with a sticky polymer. The droplet rolls like a ball over the plate, sticking the DNA to the plate surface. The unraveled DNA can then be studied under a microscope. The researchers described the technique in the journal ACS Nano.
A spider commonly found in garden centres in Britain is giving fresh insights into how to spin incredibly long and strong fibres just a few nanometres thick.
When diagnosing a case of Ebola, time is of the essence. However, existing diagnostic tests take at least a day or two to yield results, preventing health care workers from quickly determining whether a patient needs immediate treatment and isolation.
Bacteria usually live in species-rich communities and frequently exchange nutrients and other metabolites. Until now, it was unclear whether microorganisms exchange metabolites exclusively by releasing them into the surrounding environment or whether they also use direct connections between cells for this purpose.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found that by changing the selectivity of an enzyme, a small molecule could potentially be used to decrease the likelihood of alcohol-related cancers in an at-risk population.
Imagine: You pop a pill into your mouth and swallow it. It dissolves, releasing tiny particles that are absorbed and cause only cancerous cells to secrete a specific protein into your bloodstream. Two days from now, a finger-prick blood sample will expose whether you've got cancer and even give a rough idea of its extent.
By loading magnetic nanoparticles with drugs and dressing them in biochemical camouflage, Houston Methodist researchers say they can destroy blood clots 100 to 1,000 times faster than a commonly used clot-busting technique.
Researchers at McGill University have developed a new, low-cost method to build DNA nanotubes block by block - a breakthrough that could help pave the way for scaffolds made from DNA strands to be used in applications such as optical and electronic devices or smart drug-delivery systems.
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