Can you imagine a life-saving molecule whose “twin” is a deadly poison? As surprising as it may seem, this chemical reality is known as “chirality”. Like a right hand and a left hand, two molecules can have the same composition, but a different shape and arrangement in space. And this difference can change everything. Understanding and controlling this phenomenon is crucial to drug design. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the University of Pisa, has developed a new family of remarkably stable chiral molecules. This work opens up new prospects for the design of geometry-controlled drugs. It is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The interplay between quantum theory and gravity is one of the most challenging problems in physics today. Using new groundbreaking approach, researchers hope that quantum networks will help them test this interplay for the first time in actual experiments.

UC Santa Barbara researchers and collaborators from campus biotech spinoff Integrated Biosciences, as well as Harvard, MIT and genomics company Illumina Ventures are using optogenetics — the use of light to probe the functions of living tissue — to find compounds to help our bodies more effectively help themselves in times of physiological stress. Using an optogenetic platform developed in synthetic biologist Max Wilson’s lab at UCSB, they have already discovered dozens of molecules that can act as pan-antivirals and, specifically, two chemical scaffolds that could serve as promising development candidates in the host-directed antiviral space.