Research Highlights
Arnold Lab
Teaching Nature to Break Man-made Chemical Bonds
For the first time, scientists have engineered an enzyme that can break stubborn man-made bonds between silicon and carbon that exist in widely used chemicals known as siloxanes, or silicones. The discovery is a first step toward rendering the chemicals, which can linger in the environment, biodegradable.
Manthiriam Lab
Common Chemical Production Made Safer, More Environmentally Friendly
In a paper appearing in the journal Science, Manthiram's lab describes the development of a catalyst for producing a widely used chemical feedstock without the toxic and dangerous chemicals normally required for its production.
Brady Lab
Aided by AI, New Catheter Design Prevents Bacterial Infections
An interdisciplinary project at Caltech has designed a new type of catheter tube that impedes the upstream mobility of bacteria, without the need for antibiotics or other chemical antimicrobial methods. With the new design, which was optimized by novel artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the number of bacteria that are able to swim upstream in laboratory experiments was reduced 100-fold.
A paper describing the study appears in the journal Science Advances on January 3. The work was a collaboration between the laboratories of Chiara Daraio, Paul Sternberg John Brady, and Anima Anandkumar.
Robb Lab
Multimechanophore Polymers for Mechanically Triggered Small Molecule Release with Ultrahigh Payload Capacity
The Robb group recently published a paper describing a polymer that is capable of releasing hundreds of small molecule payloads upon mechanical activation. The substantial increase in deliverable payload capacity overcomes a major existing limitation in mechanophore design and opens the door to applications that require greater concentrations of delivered small-molecule cargo.
Seinfeld Lab and Stoltz Lab
Chemists Tackle Formation of Natural Aerosols
A new study conducted by researchers at Caltech is revealing for the first time key details about how volatile organic compounds released by trees are transformed into aerosols through atmospheric chemistry.
The paper describing the research, which appears in the journal Science, was a collaborative effort among the labs of John Seinfeld, Paul Wennberg and Brian Stoltz.
Ismagilov Lab
A New Method for Assessing the Microbiome of the Human Gut
Natalie Wu-Woods, a graduate student in the Ismagilov lab, has pioneered a simple and effective method to isolate microbial cells from host cells.
In the study published in the journal Nature Methods, Wu-Woods and her colleagues compared microbial enrichment methods to other techniques currently being used to selectively lyse host cells from gut microbiome samples.