MIT News August 25, 2023 Researchers at MIT have identified a new optical signature in a widely used class of magnetic beads, which could be used to quickly detect contaminants in a variety of diagnostic tests. They used Dynabeads coated with anti-Salmonella to bind and identify Salmonella enterica. Dynabeads presented signature peaks at 1000 and 1600 1/cm from aliphatic and aromatic C-C stretching of polystyrene, and 1350 1/cm and 1600 1/cm from amide, alpha-helix, and beta-sheet of antibody coatings of the Fe2O3 core, confirming with electron dispersive X-ray imaging. The Raman signature could be measured in dry and liquid samples. […]
Category Archives: Pathogens
Using AI, scientists find a drug that could combat drug-resistant infections
MIT News May 25, 2023 Discovering new antibiotics against Acinetobacter baumannii, a pathogen that often displays multidrug resistance has proven challenging through conventional screening approaches. An international team of researchers (Canada, USA – MIT, Harvard University) screened ~7,500 molecules for those that inhibited the growth of A. baumannii in vitro and trained a neural network with this growth inhibition dataset and performed in silico predictions for structurally new molecules with activity against A. baumannii. They discovered abaucin, an antibacterial compound with narrow-spectrum activity against A. baumannii. Further investigations revealed that abaucin perturbs lipoprotein trafficking, and it could control an A. […]
Extinct Pathogens Ushered The Fall of Ancient Civilizations, Scientists Say
Science Alert August 6, 2022 The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was involved in some of the most destructive historical pandemics circulated across Eurasia at least from the onset of the 3rd millennium BCE but the challenging preservation of ancient DNA in warmer climates has restricted evidence from culturally prominent regions such as the Eastern Mediterranean is currently lacking. An international team of researchers (Germany, Greece, USA – Temple University) presented genetic evidence for the presence of Y. pestis and Salmonella enterica, the causative agent of typhoid/enteric fever, from this period of transformation in Crete, detected at the cave site […]