Archive
06 March 2020
Light flows around corners unhindered
Researchers of AMOLF and TU Delft have seen light propagate in a special material without it suffering from reflections. The material, a photonic crystal, consists of two parts that each have a slightly different pattern of perforations.
05 March 2020
2020 Soft Matter Lectureship awarded to Valeria Garbin
The Royal Society of Chemistry has announced Dr Valeria Garbin as the recipient of the 2020 Soft Matter Lectureship. This annual award was established in 2009 to honour an early-stage career scientist who has made a significant contribution to the soft matter field.
04 March 2020
Zigzag DNA
DNA in a cell can normally be compared to spaghetti on one’s plate: a large tangle of strands. To be able to divide DNA neatly between the two daughter cells during cell division, the cell organises this tangle into tightly packed chromosomes. A protein complex called condensin has been known to play a key role in this process, but biologists had no idea exactly how this worked. Until February 2018, when scientists from the Kavli Institute at Delft University of Technology, together with colleagues from EMBL Heidelberg, showed in real time how a condensin protein extrudes a loop in the DNA. Now, follow-up research by the same research groups shows that simple bundling up such loops is by no means the only way condensin packs up DNA. The researchers discovered an entirely new loop structure, which they call the 'Z loop'. They publish this new phenomenon in Nature on 4 March, where they show, for the first time, how condensins mutually interact to fold DNA into a zigzag structure.
02 March 2020
The magnet that didn’t exist
20 February 2020
Monitoring the development of a tumour using the memory of bacteria
19 February 2020
Researchers discover new mechanism for the coexistence of species
19 February 2020
Cryo-chip overcomes obstacle to large-scale quantum computers
QuTech has resolved a major issue on the road towards a working large-scale quantum computer. QuTech (a collaboration of TU Delft and TNO), together with Intel, has designed and fabricated an integrated circuit that can operate at extremely low temperatures when controlling qubits, the essential building blocks of a quantum computer.
29 January 2020
Molecular machine tears toxic protein clumps apart
How do cells disentangle proteins that are clumped together? Researchers from AMOLF in Amsterdam and Heidelberg University now show that the molecular chaperone ClpB can forcibly pull on exposed loops of protein chains, and hence extract them from protein clumps. They published their results in Nature today.
16 January 2020
New software to better understand conversations between cells
One of the most fascinating and important properties of living cells is their capacity for self-organization. By talking to each other cells can, among other things, determine where they are in relation to each other and whether they need to turn certain genes on or off. Thus, large groups of cells are able to work together and organise into all kinds of tissues. Researchers at Delft University of Technology have now developed software that can predict and visualise conversations between cells on the basis of the molecules involved.
14 January 2020
Delft research brings new generation of batteries a step closer
For large scale introduction of electric cars it is important to develop safer batteries with more capacity compared to the current Li-ion batteries.