Observing the ultrafast electrical charging of liquids

Results extend applicability to diverse systems, from biological membranes to next-generation energy storage devices

29-Apr-2025 - Charged surfaces in contact with liquids – such as biological cell walls or battery electrodes – attract oppositely charged ions from the liquid. This creates two distinct charged regions: the surface itself and a counter-charged region in the liquid: The so-called electrical double layer. While ...

Exploring Life at Its Simplest: Scientists Create a "Minimal Cell Membrane" with Just Two Lipids

Surprising Effects of a Two-Lipid Diet

27-Nov-2024 - Lipids, or fats, are essential to life. They form the membranes around cells, protecting them from the outside. In nature, there is an enormous diversity of lipids, with each organism having its own unique combination. But what are the minimum lipid requirements for a cell to survive? A research ...

What triggers the programmed cell death mechanism?

Development and combination of various microscopic and spectroscopic techniques

13-Sep-2024 - How can molecular structures be analysed when the resolution of the techniques available is not sufficient? Researchers from the fields of physics, chemistry and medicine at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have combined and further developed various microscopic and spectroscopic ...

Poorly insulated nerve cells promote Alzheimer’s disease in old age

The results of the study show, for the first time, that defective myelin in the aging brain increases the risk of Aꞵ peptide deposition

08-Jun-2023 - Alzheimer’s disease, an irreversible form of dementia, is considered the world’s most common neurodegenerative disease. The prime risk factor for Alzheimer’s is age, although it remains unclear why. It is known that the insulating layer around nerve cells in the brain, named myelin, degenerates ...

Synthetic cells to interact with living matter

These could be used to study complex biological questions or to develop new concepts in biomedicine

24-Oct-2022 - Scientists at DWI – Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials have come one step closer to the objective of producing functional synthetic cells. The research group is probing the necessary ingredients for the design and development of materials with the ability to communicate and function with ...

Green wave for “gene cabs”

Leap in knowledge of peptide nanofibrils

03-Jun-2022 - Viruses help researchers to introduce genes into cells so that they can produce active pharmaceutical ingredients, for example. Special peptides stimulate the process. Until now, however, the efficiency increase was poorly understood. A team of researchers from the MPI for Polymer Research, the ...

Pop-up factories beneath the cell membrane

Scientists have long regarded the cytosol liquid inside a cell as a large “swimming pool” in which everything floats around freely: But it seems that previously unknown structures

17-Mar-2022 - In a study published in Cell, MDC researchers show how a cell is able to process hundreds of signals simultaneously. Andreas Bock and his colleagues believe their findings will open up a whole new field of research in cell biology. A living cell is exposed to a variety of stimuli. Countless ...

Cell Membranes in Super Resolution

For the first time ever, expansion microscopy allows the imaging of even the finest details of cell membranes. This offers new insights into bacterial and viral infection processes

04-Dec-2020 - Expansion microscopy (ExM) enables the imaging of cells and their components with a spatial resolution far below 200 nanometres. For this purpose, the proteins of the sample under investigation are cross-linked into a swellable polymer. Once the interactions between the molecules have been ...

Structural biology: Special delivery

05-Feb-2020 - Bulky globular proteins require specialized transport systems for insertion into membranes. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich researchers have determined the structure of such a system for the first time, and propose that it exploits the principle of the airlock. Many proteins that ...

Otto Hahn Medal for Jaime Agudo-Canalejo

22-Jun-2017 - Im Rahmen der 68. Jahreshauptversammlung der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG), die am 21. und 22. Juni in Weimar, Jena und Erfurt stattfindet, erhält der Nachwuchswissenschaftler vom Max-Planck-Institut für Kolloid- und Grenzflächenforschung die Otto-Hahn-Medaille. Er wird für seine herausragende ...