Crystal Valdez selected to meet with 34 laureates at international conference
From the time she was a young girl, Crystal Valdez was fascinated by science. “When I first learned we are composed of cells and that cells are composed of molecules and atoms, I was amazed and wanted to understand how it all works,” the chemistry graduate student recalled.
That curiosity ultimately led her to the laboratory of Anastassia Alexandrova at UCLA, where Valdez has earned a reputation for her research on the design and function of enzymes. (more…)
Catalysis may initiate almost all modern industrial manufacturing processes, but catalytic activity on solid surfaces is poorly understood. This is especially true for the cellulase enzymes used to release fermentable sugars from cellulosic biomass for the production of advanced biofuels. Now, researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) through support from the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) have literally shed new light on cellulase catalysis.
Using an ultrahigh-precision visible light microscopy technique called PALM – for Photo-Activated Localization Microscopy – the researchers have found a way to improve the collective catalytic activity of enzyme cocktails that can boost the yields of sugars for making fuels. Increasing the sugar yields from cellulosic biomass to help bring down biofuel production costs is essential for the widespread commercial adoption of these fuels. (more…)
Berkeley Lab Researchers Direct the Self-Assembly of Gold Nanoparticles into Device-Ready Thin films
Scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have directed the first self-assembly of nanoparticles into device-ready materials. Through a relatively easy and inexpensive technique based on blending nanoparticles with block co-polymer supramolecules, the researchers produced multiple-layers of thin films from highly ordered one-, two- and three-dimensional arrays of gold nanoparticles. Thin films such as these have potential applications for a wide range of fields, including computer memory storage, energy harvesting, energy storage, remote-sensing, catalysis, light management and the emerging new field of plasmonics.
“We’ve demonstrated a simple yet versatile supramolecular approach to control the 3-D spatial organization of nanoparticles with single particle precision over macroscopic distances in thin films,” says polymer scientist Ting Xu, who led this research. “While the thin gold films we made were wafer-sized, the technique can easily produce much larger films, and it can be used on nanoparticles of many other materials besides gold.” (more…)
