Mystery of why magic mushrooms go blue solved
Chemists reveal colourful indigo-like polymers that turn psychotropic mushrooms blue when cut
Smart contact lens can be charged up wirelessly while it’s worn
LED, antenna and printable supercapacitor built into lens without obscuring wearer’s vision
Bacterium forced to evolve to consume carbon dioxide to make biomass
Tweaked Escherichia coli could help deal with humanity’s carbon dioxide problem
Spectroscopic biomarkers track Huntington’s disease progression
Analysis recognises biochemical changes that are unique to Huntington’s
Robotic system can plan and perform biosynthesis without human intervention
New strategy combines machine learning with automation and has proven itself optimising a complex biochemical pathway
Engineered insulin with enhanced thermal stability inspired by fish-hunting snails
Four-disulfide insulin has similar bioactivity to native human insulin
Synthetic strategy exploits fluxional nitrogen to deliver three chiral centres for the price of one
Innovative method amplifies chirality and complexity in medicinally relevant cyclic hydrazines
‘Living bricks’ that can reproduce could cut construction’s carbon footprint
Bacterial biomineralisation harnessed to create building material from sand
E-liquids linked to US deaths form deadly compound when vaped
Pyrolysis of vitamin E acetate creates organic molecule with effects comparable to first world war chemical weapon
Compact pharmaceutical factory manufactures drugs on demand
Plant with modular design would occupy about half the area of a squash court
Flow synthesis produces chiral intermediate for antidepressant drug
The first solvent-free organocatalytic flow process yields the key chiral intermediate for paroxetine on a multigram-scale
Biomimetic synthesis cultivates yellow poppy pigment
Cascade process that fuses indole with orientalin verifies biosynthesis of nudicaulins
Chronic exposure to battery nanomaterial leads to resistant bacteria
Shewanella onedensis MR-1 adapts to media spiked with complex metal oxide nanoparticles
Can chemists crack our cells’ sugar code?
Can smart biomaterials deliver?
The chemistry of a curry
Sewage sells: the hidden value of wastewater
Stem cell hype
Changing the locks
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Synthetic hormone stops water loss in crops
Virtual screening and scaffold merging behind compound that closes plant stomata
Unified synthesis shows how genetic alphabet could have been put together on early Earth
Cycles of wet and then dry conditions provide the right conditions to make all the nucleobases from basic chemicals
Cryogenic properties could promote silkworm fibres into space exploration
Combination of intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms allows silks to retain both toughness and ductility at extremely low temperatures
Alzheimer’s therapy has click chemistry use, then remove, brain copper build-ups
In situ drug synthesis catalysed by endogenous copper
Metallohelices emulate antimicrobial peptides
Scientists move away from traditional drug candidates to evade resistance
Synthetic flame retardant compounds turn up as marine natural products
Finding an alga that biosynthesises halogenated anilines increases likelihood of finding an organism that can degrade the toxic compounds too
Elusive protein and key to many tropical diseases found after decades of searching
Discovery offers powerful new target to treat trypanosome parasite illnesses that affect millions
Glucose derivative replaces BPA in sustainable polycarbonate plastic
Transparent engineered plastic ditches hormone disruptor and lung irritant
New way to create huge protein polymer chains
Strategy constructs synthetic protein polymers that weigh 0.5MDa
Why photosynthetic organisms evolved to have dimeric reaction centres
Excitation energy transfer enhancements thought to compensate for decrease in charge transfer efficiency of going from monomers to dimers
Microbes and renewable energy turn carbon dioxide into edible protein
Sustainable method for producing proteins for human consumption made possible by clever two-stage bioprocess