Category: Research

WRITTEN BY ILIANA SLEVKOFF ILLUSTRATED BY JAMIE YAN Abstract:  From the nylon in your clothes to the screen of your smartphone, synthetic polymers don’t just exist in daily life—they are daily life. Conventional degradable polymers require harsh mechanical and chemical processing to break down, and often lack life-span control. Natural polymers, such as RNA, DNA,…

WRITTEN BY PRAHARSHITHA THUMATI ILLUSTRATED BY DIANA FENG Abstract Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB), is estimated to affect a quarter of the world’s population and kills more than a million people per year¹. Current treatments for TB are very costly, and require multiple drugs to be taken for months². Given the…

WRITTEN BY SHUBO ZHANG ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLOTTE CHANG Glossary Abstract This review presents current literature and most recent publications on a new drug called ONC-392/BNT-316, also known as Gotistobart, a promising new treatment for cancer. Currently, there are ways to manage and treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but due to drug resistance, cancer type,…

With a focus on macromolecular purification WRITTEN BY ANTONIO ESHO ILLUSTRATED BY ANDREA ARMENDI Introduction Kidneys are the workhorse of the renal system and facilitate filtration of nutrients and waste, and maintenance of body fluid levels in the blood. Utilizing blood pressure, the kidneys squeeze water, ions, and waste materials like urea out of the…

WRITTEN BY JORGE LOZOYA ILLUSTRATED BY CASSANDRA CHANG Blood is vital in keeping us alive and healthy. Hemostasis, or the coagulation of blood, is one of the many ways our blood helps by thickening itself to cover injured cells and prevent infection.1  Without hemostasis, bleeding from even the smallest cut would be lethal, which is…

WRITTEN BY JOSEF D. R. DANIELS ILLUSTRATED BY ANDREA ARMENDI Catalysis defines the scope of a broad range of modern synthetic techniques in molecular construction. Although each specific process differs mechanistically, catalysis is productive through its ability to lower the reaction activation energy. As a result, this effectively ‘speeds up’ the reaction and makes transformations…

BY YALE HUANG As the planet buckles under the weight of its own waste, recycling has always been upheld as our last bastion of hope. “Recycle your plastic bottles!” headlines cry. “Don’t forget to reuse your utensils and sort your waste!”  However, calls for individual responsibility fail to consider that an individual’s carbon footprint pales…

BY HAO WEI Once laboratory novelties, stable carbenes have since found widespread application in organometallics, small molecule activation, and organocatalysis.1-6 Carbenes are formally a two-coordinate, neutral carbon center featuring six valence electrons. Singlet carbenes, by far the most common isolable example, exhibit a filled σ donating and empty π accepting orbital. In this sense, carbenes…

BY CHRISTIAN KIM For decades, scientists have been looking for a suitable scaffold to help build tiny 3-D structures such as nanomaterials. One possible solution to this is DNA. Many of us can probably recall the characteristic double helix shape of DNA from biology class. In nature, DNA is limited to this double helix shape,…

BY ROBIN YU The Protein Folding Problem AlphaFold2 may be the solution to a 60 year-old problem. Around 1960, scientists were beginning to resolve the first atomic resolution protein structures, and with that came the “protein folding problem.” 1 The goal was to predict the structure of a protein purely by its amino acid sequence, and with…