Category: Research
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A Biochemical Approach to Plastic Waste
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…
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Radical Breslow Intermediates: Finding New Purpose from Carbenes
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…
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DNA Origami
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,…
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Protein Structure Prediction with AlphaFold2
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…
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A Look at the Chemistry of Einsteinium and other Trans-Plutonium Elements
BY GORDON PEIKER When a chemist needs a chemical or compound it is usually a trivial task to walk over to the stockroom or order it online. However, when a chemist needs a sample of einsteinium, instead of going to the stockroom they must go to one of the few facilities in the world that…
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Lipid Nanoparticles, a New Direction for Genetic Vector Development
BY PATRICK TSENG The standard method for transporting genetic material into cells is through viral vectors. For example, of the two gene therapies approved by the FDA (Luxturna and Zolgensma), both of them use viral vectors1. Only recently has the mention of lipid nanoparticles surfaced due to their implementation in mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech…