To understand what goes on inside a beehive you can’t just study the activity of a single bee. Likewise, to understand the photosynthetic light-harvesting that takes place inside the chloroplast of a leaf, you can’t just study the activity of a single antenna protein. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created the first computational model that simulates the light-harvesting activity of the thousands of antenna proteins that would be interacting in the chloroplast of an actual leaf...
Chemistry professor Omar Yaghi has won an inaugural Mustafa Scientific Prize, awarded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member states. The award ceremony was held in Tehran, Iran, in December.
Yaghi won in the category of Nano Science and Nanotechnologies. The Prize is also awarded in the categories of Life Science and Medical Sciences, Information and Communication Science and Technologies, and Top Scientific Achievement in other fields. The laureates in each category were awarded a special medal and certificate, and $500,000.
Trainers of dogs, horses, and other animal performers take note: a bacterium named Moorella thermoacetica has been induced to perform only a single trick, but it’s a doozy. Berkeley Lab researchers are using M. thermoacetica to perform photosynthesis – despite being non-photosynthetic – and also to synthesize semiconductor nanoparticles in a hybrid artificial photosynthesis system for converting sunlight into valuable chemical products.
“We’ve demonstrated the first self-photosensitization of a non-photosynthetic bacterium, M. thermoacetica,...
One of the key challenges facing liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of biological specimens has been the damaging effects of electron beam irradiation. The strongly ionizing electron beam is known to induce radiolysis of surrounding water molecules, leading to the formation of reactive radical species. In this study, we employ DNA-assembled Au nanoparticle superlattices (DNA-AuNP superlattices) as a model system to demonstrate that graphene and its derivatives can be used to mitigate electron beam-induced damage. We can image DNA-AuNP superlattices in their native...
Nanoparticle self-assembly has been well studied theoretically, but it remains challenging to directly observe and quantify individual nanoparticle interactions. With our custom image analysis method, we track the trajectories of nanoparticle movement with high precision from a stack of relatively noisy images obtained using liquid cell transmission electron microscopy. In a time frame of minutes, Pt–Fe nanoparticles self-assembled into a loosely packed hcp lattice. The energetics and stability of the dynamic assembly were studied quantitatively. From velocity and diffusion...
