New chemical process makes it easier to craft amino acids that don’t exist in nature

02-Aug-2023 - Every protein in your body is made up of the same 20 building blocks called amino acids. But just because nature is stuck with a limited toolkit doesn’t mean humans can’t expand it. A study published in Science by a team including Pitt chemists describes a powerful new way tocreate “unnatural” ...

The fountain of life: Water droplets hold the secret ingredient for building life

Chemists discover key to early Earth chemistry, which could unlock ways to speed up chemical synthesis for drug discovery

05-Oct-2022 - Purdue University chemists have uncovered a mechanism for peptide-forming reactions to occur in water — something that has puzzled scientists for decades. “This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” saidGraham Cooks, theHenry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical ...

Chemists find way to create "the building blocks of life"

Turning alcohol into key ingredients for new medicines

30-Jun-2020 - Chemists have found a way to turn alcohol into amino acids, the building blocks of life. In a study published in the journal Nature Chemistry, researchers explained the transformation, which involves selectively identifying and replacing molecular bonds with unprecedented precision. The finding ...

A natural product that could lead to new class of commercial herbicide and drugs

The weed killer could potentially be used to find new drugs for antibacterial medicines.

17-Jul-2018 - A garden can be a competitive environment. Plants and unseen microorganisms in the soil all need precious space to grow. And to gain that space, a microbe might produce and use chemicals that kill its plant competitors. But the microbe also needs immunity from its own poisons. By looking for that ...

A plausible recipe for early life on Earth

09-Jan-2018 - Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a fascinating new theory for how life on Earth may have begun. Their experiments demonstrate that key chemical reactions that support life today could have been carried out with ingredients likely present on the planet four billion ...

Potential 'missing link' in chemistry that led to life on earth found

08-Nov-2017 - Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a compound that may have been a crucial factor in the origins of life on Earth. Origins-of-life researchers have hypothesized that a chemical reaction called phosphorylation may have been crucial for the assembly of three key ...

Down to the wire

ONR researchers and new bacteria

18-Aug-2016 - Scientists sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) have genetically modified a common soil bacteria to create electrical wires that not only conduct electricity, but are thousands of times thinner than a human hair. As electronic devices increasingly touch all facets of people's lives, ...

Evonik invests in methionine production

14-Aug-2014 - Evonik Industries has begun construction of a new plant to produce Mepron® in Mobile (Alabama, USA). Mepron® is a special Evonik formulation of the amino acid methionine that is used in dairy cow nutrition. A special coating protects the amino acid from undesired degradation in the rumen. The new ...

Biological wires carry electricity thanks to special amino acids

13-Mar-2013 - Slender bacterial nanowires require certain key amino acids in order to conduct electricity, according to a study to be published in the journal of the American Society for Microbiology. In nature, the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens uses these nanowires, called pili, to transport electrons ...

Evonik: U.S. expansion of L-lysine capacity completed

10-Dec-2012 - Evonik Industries completed its expansion of capacity for the feed amino acid L-lysine in North America in autumn 2012. Production capacity at the Blair site in Nebraska, U.S.A., was doubled to 280,000 metric tons per year in two stages. “Evonik is also working to further expand capacity by ...