đź’Ą X-ray damage creates new structure in water?
Published:
What happens when you blast water with a femtosecond burst of intense X-rays from a FEL?
Research Vignettes
2024
🦠Mpro responds to oxidation
Published:
How does the coronavirus respond to oxidative stress? We investigated one mechanism. Read more from the EU XFEL press office, or check out our paper on oxidation in Mpro.
2023
🧬 How does photolyase repair DNA?
Published:
Anyone who’s suffered a sunburn knows first-hand that the sun can be harmful. Discomfort isn’t the only reason to take shelter in the summer, though. Direct sunlight can wreak havoc on cells’ DNA, causing up to 100 DNA damage events per exposed cell each second! In the worst case, this damage leads to dangerous cancers. To cope, humans and all other species employ DNA repair enzymes that are constantly working to keep our genomes healthy.
đź—» Protein structure prediction is at the single-structure frontier
Published:
Dramatic advances in protein structure prediction have sparked debate as to whether the problem of predicting structure from sequence is solved or not. In paper published in Nature Methods, I argue that AlphaFold2 and its peers are currently limited by the fact that they predict only a single structure, instead of a structural distribution, and that this realization is crucial for the next generation of structure prediction algorithms.
2021
đź’¦ Could there be two types of liquid water?
Published:
You probably think of water as the most important liquid in your life. It also happens to be one of the strangest and most interesting substances we know about.
2020
đź‘» Ghost Imaging
Published:
What the heck is ghost imaging? No, we’re not actually talking about taking pictures of ghosts (which was quite popular back in the day), but about a certain philosophy of measurement. The back-story and namesake of the technique start with a certain class of experiments looking into quantum entanglement. Folks were trying to figure out more about what Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance“, where entangled particles seem to be able to share information, despite being spatially separated.
⚖️ The rate-length law of protein folding
Published:
In 1969, Levinthal proposed a famous paradox, which pinpoints why protein folding – that is, the ability of proteins to find a single native state conformation in which their free energy is minimized – is so remarkable.