“Computer algorithms have designed highly efficient synthetic enzymes from scratch, with minimal need for tedious hands-on experiments to perfect them. The resulting enzymes catalyze a chemical reaction that no known natural protein can execute, achieving a reaction rate and efficiency similar to naturally occurring enzymes.

The proteins, described on 18 June in Nature, open the door to an era in which bespoke enzymes can be rapidly designed to facilitate a variety of reactions.

‘They’re remarkable,’ says Sílvia Osuna, a computational chemist at the University of Girona in Spain, who was not involved in the study. ‘It’s very hard to computationally design a highly efficient enzyme.'”

From Nature.

“Much of the internet, phone systems, television and other high-speed communications relies on a world-girdling network of fibre-optic cables. By one estimate, more than 4 billion kilometres of such cables snake beneath and between cities; the longest ones span oceans. Normally, we don’t think much about this physical network, happy just to receive the calls, web pages and cat videos it transmits. But more and more, the cables themselves are becoming a valuable source of information about the planet…

In Istanbul, these fibres have revealed potentially life-saving information about how to protect people and infrastructure against future earthquakes. Elsewhere, they are allowing researchers to measure the subsurface hum of London’s bustle, track the rumbling of Iceland’s volcanoes and map the upper reaches of our planet’s mantle. This new view of the underground has the potential to transform our understanding of the world’s constant vibration.”

From New Scientist.

“An emerging sonar technology that scans the sea floor at centimeter-scale resolution is dazzling researchers with its potential. Commercial synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) devices, originally developed by the military to identify explosive mines, are now being deployed by scientists such as Yizhaq Makovsky, a marine geoscientist at the University of Haifa. When he first saw how SAS instruments could pick out the bumps of tiny seafloor burrows, he says, ‘We realized this was a game changer.’

Only a Rhode Island–size patch of the world’s deep-sea floors has been observed up close, according to a study published on 7 May in Science Advances. That imaged area is likely to grow with the adoption of SAS, which can efficiently reveal fine details in wide swaths of the sea floor, unmasking its biology and geology. It could also be crucial in upcoming fights between deep-sea miners and the environmentalists who seek to limit seafloor exploitation.”

From Science.

“A protein located in the wrong part of a cell can contribute to several diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, and cancer. But there are about 70,000 different proteins and protein variants in a single human cell, and since scientists can typically only test for a handful in one experiment, it is extremely costly and time-consuming to identify proteins’ locations manually.

A new generation of computational techniques seeks to streamline the process using machine-learning models that often leverage datasets containing thousands of proteins and their locations, measured across multiple cell lines. One of the largest such datasets is the Human Protein Atlas, which catalogs the subcellular behavior of over 13,000 proteins in more than 40 cell lines. But as enormous as it is, the Human Protein Atlas has only explored about 0.25 percent of all possible pairings of all proteins and cell lines within the database.

Now, researchers from MIT, Harvard University, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have developed a new computational approach that can efficiently explore the remaining uncharted space. Their method can predict the location of any protein in any human cell line, even when both protein and cell have never been tested before.”

From MIT News.