The enzyme with the iron heart

Results could lead to new biocatalysts for sustainable biotechnology

11-Dec-2023 - Nitrogenases are the only enzymes capable of reducing atmospheric nitrogen to bioavailable nitrogen (ammonia), a process essential for all life on Earth. Using cryogenic electron microscopy, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, have now solved ...

Method found for analysing complex, tiny crystals

15-Feb-2023 - The atomic structure of solid substances can often be analysed quickly, easily and very precisely using X-rays. However, this requires that crystals of the corresponding substances exist. Chemist Professor Oliver Oeckler from Leipzig University and his team are developing methods to make this ...

How nitrogen is transferred by a catalyst

The detailed understanding will allow for the design of catalysts tailored for specific reactions

16-Nov-2020 - Catalysts with a metal-nitrogen bond can transfer nitrogen to organic molecules. In this process short-lived molecular species are formed, whose properties critically determine the course of the reaction and product formation. The key compound in a catalytic nitrogen-atom transfer reaction has ...

Looking at molecules from two sides with table-top femtosecond soft-X-rays

03-Jan-2019 - X-ray spectroscopy provides direct access into the nature of chemical bonds, from which the outcome of chemical reactions can be understood. For this, intense activities both at x-ray source development and implementation of new measurement methods is pursued by key research labs. Researchers at ...

Individual impurity atoms detectable in graphene

17-Apr-2018 - A team including physicists from the University of Basel has succeeded in using atomic force microscopy to clearly obtain images of individual impurity atoms in graphene ribbons. Thanks to the forces measured in the graphene’s two-dimensional carbon lattice, they were able to identify boron and ...

On the Track of Nitrogenase

Decisive step towards understanding biological nitrogen fixation taken

03-Apr-2018 - Another step has been taken towards explaining the molecular mechanisms of biological fixation of nitrogen by the enzyme nitrogenase: Dr. Daniel Sippel from Prof. Dr. Oliver Einsle’s work group at the Institute of Biochemistry of the University of Freiburg has shown that the iron-vanadium ...

Prediction of titanic nitride proved unsinkable

26-Jan-2018 - A team of experimental and computational scientists led by Carnegie's Tim Strobel and Venkata Bhadram have synthesized a long sought-after form of titanium nitride, Ti3N4, which has promising mechanical and optoelectronic properties. Standard titanium nitride (TiN), with a one-to-one ratio of ...

Prediction of nonmetallic half-metallicity

19-Sep-2017 - A team of researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Institute for Theoretical and Applied Electrodynamics (ITAE) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), in collaboration with a colleague from RIKEN (Institute for Physical and Chemical Research in Japan), has ...

Physicists demonstrate method to study atoms critical to medicine

13-Oct-2016 - UCLA physicists have shown that shining multicolored laser light on rubidium atoms causes them to lose energy and cool to nearly absolute zero. This result suggests that atoms fundamental to chemistry, such as hydrogen and carbon, could also be cooled using similar lasers, an outcome that would ...

Ultrasensitive sensor using N-doped graphene

26-Jul-2016 - A highly sensitive chemical sensor based on Raman spectroscopy and using nitrogen-doped graphene as a substrate was developed by an international team of researchers working at Penn State. In this case, doping refers to introducing nitrogen atoms into the carbon structure of graphene. This ...