Spin-out PeroCycle, which is developing a closed carbon loop system to decarbonise foundation industries, announces two new appointments strengthen the company’s leadership team at a pivotal stage of growth. 

Researchers at the University of Oulu, Finland, have developed a pine‑bark–based water‑treatment medium that efficiently removes antibiotics as well as residues of blood‑pressure and antidepressant medicines from wastewater treatment plant effluent. A new doctoral thesis reports promising results with a simple and low‑cost method in which pine bark was modified with iron.

Researchers have developed an economical random fractional ¹³C labeling strategy using methanol for eukaryotic membrane proteins expressed in yeast. This method significantly improves spectral resolution in solid-state NMR studies, enabling clearer structural and dynamic analysis at a fraction of the cost of existing approaches.

Just as avalanches on snowy mountains start with the movement of a small quantity of snow, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered that a solar flare is triggered by initially weak disturbances that quickly become more violent. This rapidly evolving process creates a ‘sky’ of raining plasma blobs that continue to fall even after the flare subsides.

Macrolide antibiotics like azithromycin rely on a complex ring structure that’s powerful but notoriously hard to control.  Researchers have uncovered how bacterial enzymes shape this ring during the biosynthesis of the antibiotic pikromycin, revealing new ways to fine-tune macrolide structures. Their findings could open the door to designing improved antibiotics through smarter biosynthetic engineering.