MIT Department of Chemistry

A team led by researchers at MIT has discovered that a distant interstellar cloud contains an abundance of pyrene, a type of large, carbon-containing molecule known as a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH). The discovery of pyrene in this far-off cloud, which is similar to the collection of dust and gas that eventually became our own solar system, suggests that pyrene may have been the source of much of the carbon in our solar system. That hypothesis is also supported by a recent finding that samples returned from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu contain large quantities of pyrene. “One of the big questions in star and planet formation is: How much of the chemical inventory from that early molecular cloud is inherited and forms the base components of the solar system? What we’re looking at is the start and the end, and they’re showing the same thing. That’s pretty strong evidence that this material from the early molecular cloud finds its way into the ice, dust, and rocky bodies that make up our solar system,” says Brett McGuire, an assistant professor of chemistry at MIT. Due to its symmetry, pyrene itself is invisible to the radio astronomy techniques that have been used to detect about 95 percent of molecules in space. Instead, the researchers detected an isomer of cyanopyrene, a version of pyrene that has reacted with cyanide to break its symmetry. The molecule was detected in a distant cloud known as TMC-1, using the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope (GBT), a radio telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. McGuire and Ilsa Cooke, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of British Colombia, are the senior authors of a paper describing the findings, which appears today in Science. Gabi Wenzel, an MIT postdoc in McGuire’s group, is the lead author of the study. https://lnkd.in/ebUXy8dn

Many thanks to the MIT Club of Germany for recently welcoming Professor Moungi Bawendi, a 2023 Chemistry Nobel Laureate, to Frankfurt for a fireside chat.

Some of the most widely used drugs today, including penicillin, were discovered through a process called phenotypic screening. Using this method, scientists are essentially throwing drugs at a problem — for example, when attempting to stop bacterial growth or fixing a cellular defect — and then observing what happens next, without necessarily first knowing how the drug works. Perhaps surprisingly, historical data show that this approach is better at yielding approved medicines than those investigations that more narrowly focus on specific molecular targets. But many scientists believe that properly setting up the problem is the true key to success. Certain microbial infections or genetic disorders caused by single mutations are much simpler to prototype than complex diseases like cancer. These require intricate biological models that are far harder to make or acquire. The result is a bottleneck in the number of drugs that can be tested, and thus the usefulness of phenotypic screening. Now, a team of scientists led by Professor Alex Shalek's Lab has developed a promising new way to address the difficulty of applying phenotyping screening to scale. Their method allows researchers to simultaneously apply multiple drugs to a biological problem at once, and then computationally work backward to figure out the individual effects of each. For instance, when the team applied this method to models of pancreatic cancer and human immune cells, they were able to uncover surprising new biological insights, while also minimizing cost and sample requirements by several-fold — solving a few problems in scientific research at once. https://lnkd.in/drXKcHE5

Happy National Chemistry Week! 🧪 Celebrate with fun (and free!) online courses taught by MIT Department of Chemistry faculty: https://bit.ly/3Y8NIIK MIT OpenCourseWare MITx Courses MIT School of Science #ACS_NCW #NationalChemistryWeek #Chemistry #OnlineLearning #OnlineEducation #OpenEducation #OER #OpenEducationalResources #FreeEducation #STEMEducation #STEM #STEAM #STEAMEducation

Save the Date and join us next week for MIT's Virtual Graduate Fair on Tuesday, October 22 from 3PM–5PM ET. This event is an opportunity for prospective graduate students to learn about MIT's 47 graduate programs and summer research opportunities. The schedule of events are as follows: 1:00 -1:30 PM: Welcome from Dean Denzil Streete and GradDiversity 1:30 - 2:30 PM: GradCatalyst: An MIT Student Perspective 2:30 - 3:00 PM: MSRP Info Session 3:00 -5:00 PM: Virtual Graduate Fair The Zoom link is posted below - we look forward to seeing you! https://lnkd.in/dWArvGR9

David Sarabia is originally from a rural town known as Mexia, Texas, and is a second-year graduate student in the Pentelute Lab. David’s research focuses on advancing methods for the rapid production of chemically synthesized biomacromolecules, including mirror image proteins (D-proteins) and peptide nucleic acids (PNAs). These synthetically challenging classes of biomacromolecules are valued for their unique properties, which have a wide range of potential applications. “I chose to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry because I love problem-solving, which can be addressed by the development of creative solutions,” said David. “Also, I want to make chemistry more attainable for individuals and communities who might not have the opportunity to discover its marvels and complexities.” As the subject of this month’s Graduate Student Spotlight, David reveals the most interesting place he’s ever been, the people who have impressed him the most with their accomplishments, what makes his hometown special, and more! https://lnkd.in/eaMUmubm

The earliest life on earth created biological molecules despite the limited materials available in the primordial soup such as CO2, hydrogen gas, and minerals containing iron, nickel, and sulfur. As ancient microbes evolved, they developed proteins that sped up chemical reactions, called enzymes. Enzymes were evolutionarily advantageous because they created local environments called active sites optimized for reaction performance. Although we know that carbon is the building block of life on earth–we wouldn’t exist without carbon-based molecules such as proteins and DNA–much remains unclear about how more complex carbon-based molecules were originally generated from CO2. Proteins and DNA are huge molecules with thousands of carbon atoms, so creating life from CO2 would be no small undertaking. Catherine Drennan, Professor of Biology and Chemistry and HHMI Investigator and Professor, has long studied the enzymes that perform these crucial reactions wherein CO2 is converted into a form of carbon that cells can use, which requires iron, nickel, and sulfur. In particular, she uses structural biology to study carbon monoxide dehydrogenase (CODH), which reacts with CO2 to produce CO, and acetyl-CoA synthase (ACS), which uses CO with another single unit of carbon to create a carbon-carbon bond. Crystallographic work by Drennan and others has provided structural snapshots of bacterial CODH and ACS, but its structure in other contexts remains elusive. Alison Biester (PhD '24) worked with Drennan on the structural characterization of CODH and ACS, culminating in a publication in PNAS, published October 3, 2024. https://lnkd.in/eNxwk27P

Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the commercial world, where their novel innovations aim to improve productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, creating economic, environmental, and societal benefits along the way. Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria in order to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security. “Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually. https://lnkd.in/d53kVcMm

Originally from Bogotá, Colombia, Juan Felipe Torres Gonzalez has been a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Mircea Dincă‘s lab for a year now. Juan Felipe is currently working on the development of new materials that can support metals for catalytic applications of industrial interest. The goal is to obtain robust heterogeneous catalysts that minimize the cost and the environmental impact of separation processes. “What brought me into the field of chemistry was my curiosity,” said Juan Felipe. “I have always asked myself many questions about the nature of things, and chemistry offered a good explanation for a lot of those questions. In the future, I expect to continue my academic career, have my own group and continue teaching chemistry.” As the subject of this Postdoctoral Researcher in the Spotlight, Juan Felipe reveals the things he’d do if he didn’t have to sleep, three of his favorite fictional characters, small things that improve his day, and more! https://lnkd.in/ePZi_qPn

Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) was crowned as the Technology of the Year by Nature Methods in 2020. This cutting-edge technology allows for the detection of gene expression within cells while preserving their “spatial information”—meaning the exact physical location of each cell within the tissue. This spatial information is essential for understanding how cells interact within their native environments, offering insights that traditional gene expression technologies, such as single-cell RNA-seq, which may lose positional context, cannot provide. Up to now, various experimental technologies have been developed based on different mechanisms, to expand the ability to measure molecular characteristics beyond gene expression, such as RNA translation expression and protein abundance. However, the integration and comparison of spatial data across different technologies and molecular features pose significant challenges due to variations in technologies, sample types, resolutions, and gene sets. To address these challenges, researchers from Associate Professor of Chemistry Xiao Wang’s lab at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard developed a computational method called CAST. CAST uses deep graph neural networks—advanced machine learning algorithms designed to model relationships between data points, in this case, individual cells, based on their connections (or “edges”) within a spatial network. CAST can extract shared spatial features, enabling spatial-to-spatial searches and physical alignment at the single-cell level. https://lnkd.in/enf6GF3w