Chemistry has provided many key tools and techniques to the biological community in the last twenty years. We can now make proteins that Mother Nature never thought of, image unique parts of live cells and even see cells in live animals. This week in ACS Central Science, two research groups from the University of Geneva and the University of Basel, both members of the NCCR Molecular Systems Engineering, show how to design an unnatural protein with new-to-nature capabilities.
Maternal stress and depression during pregnancy may activate certain protective mechanisms in babies. Psychologists from the University of Basel report that certain epigenetic adaptations in newborns suggest this conclusion.
Physicists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the University of Basel have succeeded in measuring the very weak van der Waals forces between individual atoms for the first time. To do this, they fixed individual noble gas atoms within a molecular network and determined the interactions with a single xenon atom that they had positioned at the tip of an atomic force microscope. As expected, the forces varied according to the distance between the two atoms; but, in some cases, the forces were several times larger than theoretically calculated.
The Universities of Basel, Freiburg, Upper Alsace, and Strasbourg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have taken a big step toward creating the first European university: On Wednesday, 11 May 2016, they opened “Eucor – The European Campus” with a ceremony at the Palais universitaire in Strasbourg, thus giving themselves the possibility to act as a single entity.
Predictions from quantum physics have been confirmed by countless experiments, but no one has yet detected the quantum physical effect of entanglement directly with the naked eye. This should now be possible thanks to an experiment proposed by a team around a theoretical physicist at the University of Basel. The experiment might pave the way for new applications in quantum physics.
Exercise can have a positive influence on certain symptoms of multiple sclerosis: Patients who do yoga and aquatic exercise suffer less from fatigue, depression and paresthesia, as reported by researchers from Basel.
Using an ultra fast-scanning atomic force microscope, a team of researchers from the University of Basel has filmed “living” nuclear pore complexes at work for the first time. Nuclear pores are molecular machines that control the traffic entering or exiting the cell nucleus. In their article published in “Nature Nanotechnology”, the researchers explain how the passage of unwanted molecules is prevented by rapidly moving molecular “tentacles” inside the pore.
Scientists from the University of Basel have developed a new method that has enabled them to image magnetic fields on the nanometer scale at temperatures close to absolute zero for the first time. They used spins in special diamonds as quantum sensors in a new kind of microscope to generate images of magnetic fields in superconductors with unrivalled precision.
When medication is used to shut off the oxygen supply to tumor cells, the cells adapt their metabolism in the medium term – by switching over to producing energy without oxygen. This observation by biomedical scientists at the University of Basel and University Hospital Basel could be used for treatment.