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A team of scientists from around the world, including from Trinity College Dublin, has obtained high-resolution structural insights into a key bacterial enzyme, which may help chemists design new drugs to inhibit it, thereby inhibiting disease-causing bacteria. Their work is important amid growing concerns about rising antibiotic resistance.

The scientists, led by Martin Caffrey, Emeritus Fellow of Trinity's Faculty of Medicine and School of Biochemistry and Immunology, used…

Fluorescent substance and fluorescent labeling technology

The compounds upon which fluorescent labeling depends are called fluorescent substances. Fluorescent substances refer to compounds with a conjugated double bond system chemical structure, which can be excited into an excited state when irradiated by ultraviolet light or blue-violet light, and emit fluorescence when returning to the ground state from the excited state.

Fluorescent labeling…

As global temperatures continue to rise, maintaining the quality and yield of cold-adapted crops will increasingly become a challenge. One crop known to be affected by higher nighttime temperatures during the ripening stage is rice, which exhibits a condition known as "chalkiness" due to heat stress.

Chalky refers to rice grains that are less dense due to the reduced concentration of starch. This can lead to lower grind yields, cooking quality and overall market…

Wang Chengshu's research group from the Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences published a paper entitled "A bacterial-like Pictet-Spenglerase drives the evolution of fungi to produce b-carboline glycosides together with separate genes" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This study reveals the molecular mechanism of the entomopathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana acquiring a bacterial-derived horizontal transfer (HGT) gene to…