Amanda, who heads CSIRO’s Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory, has been able to come up with a trade-off—the optimum size of particle to provide maximum UV protection for minimal toxicity while maintaining transparency—by modelling the relevant interactions on a supercomputer.
Continue reading Saving our skins
But in the course of studying hundreds of these dissolving balls, Kate began to see what looked like muscle fibres between the bones. She was eventually able to convince her colleagues that irreplaceable soft tissue detail was being lost in the acid treatments.
Continue reading Seeing fish through rocks
Using the technique called neutron activation analysis, Dr Rachel Popelka-Filcoff can “geochemically fingerprint” Aboriginal ochre pigments from different locations, archaeological sites and artefacts.
Dr Roman Dronov, also from Flinders, is using the reactor to study the formation of bacterial protein layers. He is applying what he finds to constructing a new type of biosensor based on these layers and porous silicon. These highly sensitive devices can rapidly detect trace amounts of molecules, such as environmental poisons and markers of disease—a great improvement on traditional analytical methods.
Continue reading OPAL reactor fingerprints Aboriginal ochre
This is one of many strands of research aimed at increasing the success rates of corneal transplants and other eye disease treatments undertaken by Prof Keryn Williams at Flinders University.
Continue reading Helping eyes to help themselves
Now University of Sydney PhD student Kara Matthews has used satellite data and GPlates, a computer package developed at the University, to create a complete digital map of the many geological features of the seafloor.
Fracture zones—the orange lines in the accompanying image—are deep linear scars on the seafloor that extend perpendicular to the boundaries where tectonic plates are moving apart, revealing up to 150 million years of plate movement. They are accompanied by huge ridges on the seafloor, rising up to 2 km above the abyssal plains, and valleys as deep as 8 km below sea level.
Continue reading Mapping the seafloor from space
She has created new, incredibly absorbent chemicals that can capture, store and release large volumes of gas.
It’s all to do with surface area, says Deanna, a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Chemistry at The University of Sydney.
She has constructed crystals that are full of minute holes.
One teaspoon of the most effective of these compounds has the surface area of a rugby field.
What’s more, the size and shape of the pores can be customised and changed using light. So she believes she can generate molecular sponges that will mop up carbon dioxide, hydrogen, or in theory almost any gas—and then release it on cue.
In 2010, her achievements won her a $20,000 L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowship which provided equipment, travel support and a student to assist her.
Deanna’s compounds have similar molecular structures to those in seashells and the microscopic marine plants called diatoms.
These naturally-occurring materials are commonly used in toothpaste, laundry detergents, kitty litter and other industrial applications.
But her high tech equivalents are crystals known as metal-organic frameworks—clusters of charged metal atoms linked by carbon-based groups.
While she didn’t invent these frameworks, Deanna has developed new kinds of them which are more robust and possess the molecular pores that can be shaped by light.
School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney, Deanna D’Alessandro, Tel: +61 2 9351 7392, deanna@chem.usyd.edu.au, scienceinpublic.com.au/loreal
Some of the biochemical tricks the malaria parasite uses to become resistant have been unravelled thanks to a series of discoveries by Dr Rowena Martin and her colleagues at the Australian National University.She is using those insights to give a new lease of life to chloroquine, the wonder drug against malaria first discovered in the 1950s.
For more than half a century chloroquine saved hundreds of millions of lives, but now chloroquine-resistant malaria strains have become common in developing countries.
Rowena is working to understand what happened. The single-celled malaria parasite enters our bodies when we are bitten by an infected mosquito.
It eventually invades and plunders our red blood cells, consuming the haemoglobin contained within.
The digestion of haemoglobin, which takes place in the parasite’s stomach compartment, releases the iron-containing, nonprotein component, haem.
Free haem is toxic to the parasite, which responds by converting it to a harmless crystal. Chloroquine works by blocking the formation of these crystals.
Ten years ago researchers discovered that just a few small changes in a protein PfCRT were enough to give the parasite resistance to chloroquine. But they did not know what the changes did.
Rowena developed a system to study PfCRT in frog eggs—allowing her to examine it in isolation and in detail.
“We found that it moves chloroquine out of the parasite’s stomach compartment so that the drug can’t accumulate at its site of action.” For her achievements to date, in 2010 Rowena won a $20,000 L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowship.
Research School of Biology, The Australian National University, Rowena Martin, Tel: +61 2 6125 8589, Rowena.Martin@anu.edu.au, www.scienceinpublic.com.au/loreal
Mystery still surrounds why women who recover from breast cancer often relapse years later —Dr Marie-Liesse Asselin-Labat is hoping to use her knowledge of breast tissue stem cells to unravel it.In 2006, she was part of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute team that discovered breast stem cells.
She then built on this finding with a series of studies exploring how these cells develop and are influenced by oestrogen and other steroids.
Her achievements won her a $20,000 L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowship in 2010. Breast stem cells are critical to normal breast development, but if the breast becomes cancerous they are also likely to be at heart of the problem.
And that’s been the focus of Marie- Liesse’s work. In a series of high impact papers working with mice, she has explored how these breast stem cells develop into the wide range of cells found in a normal breast and how some of them become aggressive cancer cells.
In 2010 she was lead author of a Nature paper revealing that oestrogen and other steroids can control the function of breast stem cells. “It’s via an indirect mechanism important in understanding how stem cells proliferate, and it could lead to new treatments and new drugs,” she says. “But there are basic questions we still need to answer about breast cancer—such as, ‘What is the cell of origin?’ and ‘What causes a cell to go wrong and turn to cancer?’”
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Marie-Liesse Asselin-Labat, Tel: +61 3 9345 2495, labat@wehi.edu.au, loreal.scienceinpublic.com.au/marieliesse/
A recent survey found more than 95 per cent of the migratory flesh-footed shearwaters nesting on Lord Howe Island, between Australia and the northern tip of New Zealand, had swallowed plastic garbage.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, plastic has been shown to bind poisonous pollutants. As a result, some shearwaters were found with concentrations of mercury more than 7,000 times the level considered toxic.
Only six of more than 200 nests visited contained chicks. The overall population is plummeting.
Continue reading Plastic not fantastic for seabirds
Most mothers are aware that breast milk helps boost their baby’s immune levels, but up to now it has been thought that it is mainly because of the mother’s antibodies found in human milk.