Pharmaceutical scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a method that can measure the kinetic efficiency of an enzyme against more than 200,000 potential peptide substrates in a single experiment. 

Characterising the interactions between enzymes and their substrates is a fundamental task in biochemistry, essential for engineering new biocatalysts, understanding disease mechanisms, and designing therapeutics. While existing techniques can study many enzymatic reactions in parallel, scaling such methods to comprehensively analyse an enzyme's preferences across a vast space of possible substrates remains a practical challenge.

Assistant Professor Alexander Vinogradov from the NUS Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences has developed a strategy called DOMEK (mRNA-display-based one-shot measurement of enzymatic kinetics) that addresses this need.

If you think a galaxy is big, compare it to the size of the Universe: it’s just a tiny dot which, together with a huge number of other tiny dots, forms clusters that aggregate into superclusters, which in turn weave into filaments threaded with voids—an immense 3D skeleton of our Universe.

If that gives you vertigo and you’re wondering how one can understand or even “see” something so vast, the answer is: it isn’t easy. Scientists combine the physics of the Universe with data from astronomical instruments and build theoretical models, such as EFTofLSS (Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure). Fed with observations, these models describe the “cosmic web” statistically and allow its key parameters to be estimated.

Models like EFTofLSS, however, demand a lot of time and computing resources. Since the astronomical datasets at our disposal are growing exponentially, we need ways to lighten the analysis without losing precision. This is why emulators exist: they “imitate” how the models respond, but operate much faster.

Since this is a kind of “shortcut,” what’s the risk of losing accuracy? An international team including, among others, INAF (Italy), The University of Parma (Italy) and the University of Waterloo (Canada) has published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP) a study testing the emulator Effort.jl, which they designed. It shows that Effort.jl delivers essentially the same correctness as the model it imitates—sometimes even finer detail—while running in minutes on a standard laptop instead of a supercomputer.

New Curtin University research has uncovered a striking link between the structure of our galaxy and the evolution of Earth’s crust, showing its development was shaped by the impact of meteorites during its journey through the Milky Way and not solely through internal processes as was previously widely considered.

Researchers at UC Davis have been awarded a $3 million National Science Foundation grant to develop new technologies and workforce training programs to grow plants in low-resource environments both on Earth and in space. 

A research team has successfully developed a novel platform for reconfigurable nonlinear optics based on ion-doped ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals (FNLCs). This allows for precise control over the phase, polarization, and amplitude of light waves through space-varying Pancharatnam-Berry phases, opening new possibilities for advanced optical processing and quantum information technologies.

A pioneering international project led by prominent female scientists, involving research staff from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and promoted by the Spanish Space Agency (AEE), has just completed its parabolic flight campaign in Bordeaux (France). Its main objective is to study and counteract the adverse effects of microgravity on the human body, a key challenge for future exploration of the Moon and Mars.