EurekAlert! News by Subject: Tech & Engineering - News by Subject: Tech & Engineering

Tech & Engineering

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 16-Jun-2025 03:10 ET (16-Jun-2025 07:10 GMT/UTC)

New automated method increases the efficiency of bioactive natural product discovery

Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Peer-Reviewed Publication

From caffeine to penicillin, natural products have become a mainstay in modern society and are used for numerous applications such as medicine and pesticides. There are tens of thousands of untapped natural products, but identifying new compounds with bioactivity can be difficult, especially when produced in low quantities. To overcome this, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed FAST-NPS, a new method to accelerate the discovery and scale up of bioactive natural products found in Streptomyces.

Journal: Cell Systems

Lighting the way: how activated gold reveals drug movement in the body

Waseda University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Tracking targeted drug delivery is often a challenge due to limitations in the current imaging techniques. A recent study by Tokyo’s Waseda University reports a breakthrough imaging technique that allows direct and highly sensitive tracking of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) inside the body. This novel technique, which uses neutron activation of gold, could revolutionize cancer drug delivery by enabling real-time visualization of the gold nanoparticles without external tracers.

Journal: Applied Physics Letters

Holograms with a twist: Entangling light and information

SPIE--International Society for Optics and Photonics
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers from Hong Kong and the UK have developed a novel method for creating quantum holograms using metasurfaces, as detailed in a recent study published in Advanced Photonics. By combining metasurfaces with nonlinear crystals, they achieved entanglement of polarization and holographic information. This innovative approach allows for the generation of quantum holograms, where specific holographic letters can be selectively erased by adjusting the polarization of entangled photons. The study demonstrates the potential of metasurfaces to enhance quantum communication and anti-counterfeiting technologies, offering a compact and flexible alternative to conventional materials. This breakthrough not only advances our understanding of quantum mechanics but also paves the way for practical applications in quantum information processing.

Journal: Advanced Photonics

Promising new research shows potential to cure recurrent urinary tract infections

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus studied a new method to deliver antibiotics, specifically gentamicin, directly into the bladder tissue to better treat UTIs. They did this by creating nanogels combined with a special peptide (a small protein) that helps the drug get inside the cells where the bacteria are hiding.

The results, published in Nanomedicine, demonstrate that this approach proved highly effective when tested in animal models with UTIs, eliminating over 90% of the bacteria from the bladder.

“We prove not only that this technology is doable but could be very effective for future clinical use and can potentially lead towards an eventual cure of recurrent infections,” said the paper’s senior author Michael Schurr, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Immunology & Microbiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The researchers discovered that nanogel technology can carry more than enough gentamicin to be effective - about 36% more gentamicin inside cells compared to standard antibiotic delivery methods. Additionally, it exhibits low toxicity, causing minimal harm to cells.

They also found that nanogels release the drug quickly, which helps kill bacteria in the bladder faster.

Journal: Nanomedicine

Study finds cities that conducted greenhouse gas emissions inventories moved needle toward reduction

University of Kansas
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at the University of Kansas led a study in which they gathered emissions data from hundreds of US cities that either conducted a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, or reported they employed sustainability staff. The cities that conducted an inventory showed a statistically significant reduction in emissions between 2010 and 2015, while those with sustainability staff did not. Little research had previously been done to gauge effects of such measures and show that addressing emissions is meaningful, researchers argue.

Journal: Cities

Tissue engineering offers new hope for spinal cord injury repair

Higher Education Press
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new study published in Engineering reviews the latest research in tissue engineering for spinal cord injury (SCI) repair. It explores the roles of biomaterials, cells, dECM, exosomes, and other factors. Although more research is needed, these findings offer new directions for SCI treatment.

Journal: Engineering

Software startup Molecular Intelligence improves structuring molecules from cryo-EM image data

Purdue University
Business Announcement

Purdue University-connected startup Molecular Intelligence supports research scientists in bioengineering, medical science and pharmaceutical companies who use cryo-EM to determine 3D structures of proteins, nucleic acids and other biomolecules. The company's software suite leverages deep learning to enable the identification of atom positions in low-resolution cryo-EM maps. The software then uses those identified atom positions to construct the 3D structures of proteins and DNA/RNA.

Funder: NIH/National Institutes of Health