Discover: Research Roundup

Rochester chemical engineers have taken an important step toward demonstrating the feasibility of powering ships by converting seawater into fuel. In collaboration with researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Pittsburgh, and OxEon Energy, the Rochester team reported that a specially designed catalyst can be an efficient and reliable way to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, a critical step in turning seawater into fuel at an industrial scale.

Described in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, the process uses a molybdenum carbide catalyst that, when primed with potassium, becomes a low-cost, stable, and highly selective catalyst that’s key to creating a hydrocarbon that ships can use as fuel. Led by Marc Porosoff, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Rochester who was part of an earlier research team at the Naval Research Laboratory, the researchers conducted a series of experiments at molecular, laboratory, and pilot scales to document the catalyst’s suitability to be scaled up.

The work is important to the Navy because if ships could create their own fuel from seawater, they could remain in near continuous operation. Currently, most ships require tanker ships to replenish their fuel oil while at sea, which can be difficult in rough weather.

—Bob Marcotte

Circadian Rhythms Help Guide Waste from Brain

New Rochester research details how the complex set of molecular and fluid dynamics that comprise the glymphatic system—the brain’s way of removing waste materials—are synchronized with the master internal clock that regulates the sleep-wake cycle.

The findings suggest that people who rely on sleeping during daytime hours are at greater risk for developing neurological disorders.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study adds to a growing understanding of the operation and function of the brain’s self-contained waste removal system. That system was first discovered in 2012 by researchers in the lab of Maiken Nedergaard, codirector of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at Rochester.

Nedergaard, the senior author of the new study, says the findings demonstrate that the glymphatic system’s function is based on daily rhythms dictated by our biological clock and not solely on sleep or wakefulness.

Since the initial discoveries of the system, Nedergaard’s lab and others have shown the role that blood pressure, heart rate, circadian timing, and depth of sleep play in the glymphatic system’s operation and the chemical signaling that occurs in the brain to turn the system on and off.

Researchers have also shown how disrupted sleep or trauma can cause the system to break down and allow toxic proteins to accumulate in the brain, potentially giving rise to a number of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.

—Mark Michaud

Finally, a Way to See Molecules ‘Wobble’

Using a plate glass that’s been uniformly stressed, researchers from Rochester and France have demonstrated a microscopy method that offers groundbreaking insights into the behavior of molecules. The work could provide invaluable information about biological processes, such as when a cell and the proteins that regulate the cell’s functions react to a virus.

Nicknamed CHIDO—for “Coordinate and Height super-resolution Imaging with Dithering and Orientation”—the technology was described in a new paper published in Nature Communications. The project is a collaboration involving Sophie Brasselet, director of the Fresnel Institute in France, and Miguel Alonso and Thomas Brown, both professors at Rochester’s Institute of Optics.

Precise within “tens of nanometers in position and a few degrees of orientation,” the device can show not only the position and orientation of molecules in 3D, the team reports, but also how the particles wobble and oscillate.

The new technology transforms the image of a single molecule into a distorted focal spot, the shape of which directly encodes more precise 3D information than possible with previous measurement tools. In effect, CHIDO can produce beams that have every possible polarization state.

“This is one of the beauties of optics,” Brown says. “If you have a device that can create just about any polarization state, then you also have a device that can analyze just about any possible polarization state.”

—Bob Marcotte

Was There a ‘Snowball Earth’?

Rochester researchers are providing new evidence for a theory that has intrigued geological scientists for a long time.

Was there a period when ice covered every surface of the planet, as some scientists posit in a hypothesis known as “Snowball Earth”? If so, how could the planet have gone so cold—even in the warmest regions of Earth?

In a paper published in Science Advances, Scott MacLennan, a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of Mauricio Ibanez-Mejia, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, presented the first geological evidence that Earth’s climate may have begun to cool even before a known period of severe glaciation that lasted from 1,000 to 540 million years ago in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history.

The researchers report that there may have been ice at high altitudes in the tropics in the period before a Snowball Earth event, indicating that the planet may have begun cooling earlier than researchers originally thought.

—Lindsey Valich

Imaging the Secret Lives of Immune Cells in the Eye

Rochester researchers have demonstrated a way to track the interactions of microscopic immune cells in a living eye without dyes or damage, a first for imaging science.

Combining infrared videography and artificial intelligence, the new technique could be a “game-changer” for some clinical diagnoses as well as for fields like pharmaceuticals.

Vision scientist Jesse Schallek and his lab at the Center for Visual Science and Flaum Eye Institute, reported a new microscopy technique, described in the journal eLIFE, that builds on groundbreaking adaptive optics developed at the University more than 20 years ago.

Combined with time lapse videography and artificial intelligence software, the new technique enables researchers for the first time to noninvasively image and track—without labeling—the interactions of translucent immune cells within live retinal tissue.

Until now, the immune cells had to be labeled with fluorescent agents and often reinjected in order to image them—raising questions about how the procedure might change the behavior of the cells.

Another common, but limiting, approach is to remove cells and study them with a microscope in a lab.

—Bob Marcotte

Mapping Mechanisms: How Cancer Gets Under Way

A project to describe the dynamic push and pull between two proteins is shedding light on the interaction among genetics, nongenetic influences on cells, and cancer, according to new Rochester research.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, Patrick Murphy, an assistant professor of biomedical genetics at Rochester, and a team at the Wilmot Cancer Institute mapped the relationship between the two proteins—ANP32E and H2AZ—that are important in cell division and aggressive tumors, as well as metastatic cancer.

The work adds critical information in the study of epigenetics, an effort to understand which biological factors influence inherited gene changes and predisposition to diseases, and how lifestyle behaviors passed down through generations and chemical exposures can also alter the function of genes and lead to cancer and other illnesses.

By understanding and controlling how proteins operate, scientists hope to find an avenue to preventing cancer.

The “precise control of ANP32E levels and H2A positioning may be critical for preventing carcinogenesis,” the researchers report. Thus, it will be important for future studies to investigate the mechanisms described here in the context of human diseases, including cancer.”

—Leslie Orr