For more than a century, pharmaceutical companies have relied on flat structures called aromatic rings, which can help drugs bind to target sites in the body. They include benzene rings and other flat, nitrogen-containing rings. But there are limits to their usefulness.

For more than a century, pharmaceutical companies have relied on flat structures called aromatic rings, which can help drugs bind to target sites in the body. They include benzene rings and other flat, nitrogen-containing rings. But there are limits to their usefulness.

Life in the deep sea is under immense pressure—literally. Such extreme conditions can disrupt the delicate structures of proteins essential to life. Yet somehow, the proteins in deep-sea creatures remain functional. This raises an intriguing question: how?

Life in the deep sea is under immense pressure—literally. Such extreme conditions can disrupt the delicate structures of proteins essential to life. Yet somehow, the proteins in deep-sea creatures remain functional. This raises an intriguing question: how?

Lipid droplets in the kidneys may help cats maintain a consistent chemical “scent identity.” Scent marks can linger long after an animal has moved on, allowing urine and other chemical signals to carry information across both distance and time. Yet the molecules responsible for odor do not remain unchanged. They evaporate, break down, and shift [...]

Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology's (SMART) Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research group, alongside collaborators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore), and institutions in the United States, Poland and France, have discovered aminovaleramididine synthetase (AvaS), the first identified pyridoxal phosphate (PLP)-dependent enzyme responsible for producing a chemical modification linked to how bacteria respond to metabolic stress.