Category: Uncategorised

Predicting protein structures and building Legos

We welcome back guest blogger, Manya Bhargava, to explain this year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize, awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, for the development of AlphaFold! Developed by Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI, AlphaFold is an AI system that predicts protein structures.

Imagine you’ve just bought a new Lego set. You’re super excited to get started. You have the pieces arranged, and all you need are the instructions to tell you how to fit them together. But someone seems to have played an awful prank on you. Instead of instructions in the box, you find a long list of clues about how the blocks need to fit together. Blue blocks can only connect to yellow ones, flat bricks can only be on the top… and so on. You know what the final model should look like, but this sure makes it much harder to build!

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The rise of cultivated meat II: beyond cell culture

In our previous blog (Future of Food: Exploring the Rise of Cultivated Meat), guest bloggers, Wynsee Lu and Mekumi Chan, told us about the potential of cultivated meat as a sustainable food option. As they read articles on the topic, they discovered this industry goes beyond standard cell culture. In fact, there are a lot of additional aspects to consider for cultivated meat. Lab-grown meat is a great example of how we need to have molecular understanding to effectively engineer new products. In this blog, they explore the diversity in this industry and its potential for growth.

The molecular origin of flavour

For consumers, the most important sensory characteristics of cultivated meats are the taste and texture compared to real meat. The main way industries have attempted to achieve the natural taste of meat within this sustainable food option is by mimicking the Maillard reaction. The Maillard reaction is the natural process that normal meats undergo when browning under heat to bring out aromas and flavours. Simultaneous chemical reactions between the amino acids and reducing sugars in the meat achieve the desired outcome. To mimic this, researchers use a temperature-sensitive flavour-switchable scaffold to enhance the aromatic properties of cultivated meats. This scaffold “switches on’ while cooking and the chemical reactions within it release crucial flavours to appease consumers. This is not the only way to reproduce the flavours of real meat and industries are developing new methods every day.

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Future of Food: Exploring the Rise of Cultivated Meat

Over the summer, IMSE welcomes undergraduate students to spend a day working side to side with our Operations team. They help us explore new topics in the field of molecular science and engineering and design outreach activities. In August, Wynsee Lau (Medical Biosciences undergraduate) and Mekumi Chan (Biological Sciences undergraduate) combined their interest in scientific research and public engagement to write a blog. They chose to write about the exciting potential of the cultivated meat field and situated it in the context of a well known event, the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Aiming for a gold medal in sustainability at the Olympics games

As we enjoy the last month of summer, the most memorable event of this season has to be the Paris Olympics. Whether it was memorable because of the unique opening ceremony, I’m sure we’ve all seen some TikTok of the Olympic village and Paris’ attempt for a more ‘sustainable’ games. One of Paris’ approaches was to half the amount of animal products compared to any other Olympics. Instead of meat, they introduce more plant-based foods.  This decision led to a decrease in carbon emissions; however, there were also complaints from some of the athletes.  What can future Olympic hosts do to cut down these alarming carbon emissions whilst also fueling the athletes with the appropriate nutrients needed? In the growing industry of biotechnology, many startups are investigating the possibility of growing meat in the lab. 

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3D printed sculpture, microscope or both?

If you had access to a 3D printer, what would you print? Something fun, something useful? How about both?

Alex Christopherson, a final year undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London and David Samuel, an artist based in Park Royal Design Studios, collaborated to create a 3D printed sculpture that doubles as a microscope and allows you to see a 3D printed Queens Tower 100,000 times smaller than the real one! Engineering and art coming together to 3D print a sculpture.

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Important little things (atoms, genes and molecules) to solve grand challenges

Over summer, IMSE welcomes undergraduate students to spend a day working side to side with our Operations team. They help us explore new topics in the field of molecular science and engineering and draft questions for upcoming podcasts. In July, Polly Dean (Biology) and Manya Bhargava (Physics) combined their interest in plant science, quantum physics and genetics to write a blog exploring the interaction between these fields and the wide range of applications.

Quantum mechanics is a branch of Physics which describes the behaviour of  subatomic particles (electrons, protons, neutrons). Genetic engineering is a method in Biology research which alters an organism’s characteristics by manipulating its genetic material. Despite their different definitions, both influence processes that control molecular interactions. Bringing together their knowledge on Biology and Physics, Polly and Manya explored examples where the combination of both disciplines (quantum and genetics) is solving global grand challenges. These include applying molecular aspects of photosynthesis to renewable energy systems, and increasing our understanding of immune responses for vaccine development.

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Injecting Hope – Vaccine development in a pandemic

Earlier this June, people at Imperial College London had the opportunity to hear from a scientist who affected all our lives, Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert from the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford. The Department of Life Sciences hosted Prof Gilbert for the Sir Ernst Chain lecture, a celebration of the late biochemist who developed the techniques to isolate and produce Penicillin, together with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming.

Prof Gilbert works on viral vector vaccines. In 2020 she led the group who, together with Astra Zeneca, developed and produced one of the Covid-19 vaccines. The Oxford/Astra Zeneca (ChAdOx1 nCov-19) vaccine was used in 180 countries. It is estimated to have saved over 6 million lives in the first year it was used!

Our guest blogger, Arabella Heath wrote a blog post about her talk and how combination of molecular science and engineering was crucial for vaccine development in a pandemic.

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Microplastics: the cost of laundry

When you think about plastic pollution, you probably think of water bottles, single-use plates and cutlery, or food packaging. “Oh well, I don’t litter, so I’m not responsible” you might think. But in fact, you probably do contribute to plastic pollution: every time you wash your clothes. The escape of microplastics from laundry is a substantial problem. This is another guest blog post from an IMSE work experience student, Rolando Charles!

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Engineering agrochemicals for drone delivery

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about formulated products, how formulated products have climate impact, and what sorts of skills are needed to reformulate to make them more sustainable. In the coming weeks, I’m going to give some examples of how changing a product to adapt to or mitigate climate change also requires changing the formulation. This turns out to be a complex process. Here’s the first example: reformulating fertilizers and pesticides for drone delivery.

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Talking formulations

New podcast alert!

This month I’ve been talking to three researchers at Imperial College London about their work on formulations. Formulations are a class of modern products which are all complex mixtures of many different elements. The evidence is the ingredients list on the back of the packet. These kinds of advanced formulated chemical products are everywhere in modern life: we use them daily to stay healthy, warm, dry, fed, clean and connected.

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