Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space-time, explains a multitude of gravitational phenomena, but that theory falls apart within the tiniest of volumes.
Researchers at Berkeley Lab and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposed an experiment that may settle the persistent question: Is gravity truly a quantum force? They recently described their work in the journal Physical Review X Quantum.
Scientists who specialize in studying the atom-by-atom choreography of enzymes have revealed new insights into the function of isopenicillin N synthase, an enzyme needed to produce some of the world’s most critical antibiotics.
For structural biologists who study proteins, predicting their shape offers a key to understanding their function and accelerating treatments for diseases like cancer and COVID-19. The current approaches to accurately mapping that shape have their limitations, but by applying powerful machine learning methods to the large library of protein structures it is now possible to predict a protein’s shape from its gene sequence.
In celebration of the Lab’s 90th anniversary, 16 of our most popular “90 Breakthroughs” faced off in the first ever Berkeley Lab Breakthroughs Bracket Challenge on Twitter. After four weeks of public voting online, the top breakthrough was “Created a Powerful Gene Editing Tool”—otherwise known as CRISPR!
An antibody therapy that appears to neutralize all known SARS-CoV-2 strains, and other coronaviruses, was developed with a little help from structural biologist Jay Nix.
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