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Rice paper has material characteristics similar to the most widely used silicone materials in soft robotics, opening up exciting possibilities for researchers. (Source: University of Bristol)
Innovation

Introducing Robots from Rice Paper

Scientists have developed renewable soft robots from rice paper which have the capacity to biodegrade safely within 32 days. They claim that rice paper has material characteristics similar to the most widely used silicone materials in soft robotics.

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Researchers turn brewer’s yeast into miniature peptide factories — paving the way for faster, greener drug discovery with potential to treat hard-to-target diseases. (Source: free licensed)
Drug Development

From Brewery to Pharma: Yeast’s Journey to Curing Diseases

Researchers at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice have transformed ordinary brewer’s yeast into miniature factories for producing and screening therapeutic peptides. Their new method, published in Nature Communications, enables the rapid and environmentally friendly discovery of macrocyclic peptides — highly promising drug candidates for precision medicine.

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Kobe University bioengineers came up with a new way of automatically grouping large numbers of enzymes in a way that makes it easy to select a set of meaningful representatives and focus research on these. (Source: Hidese Ryota)
From Data to Discovery

New Robotic Method Unearths Super-Enzyme for Green Chemistry

Hasunuma Tomohisa and his team developed a workflow that allows them to screen a large variety of enzymes for a given function and tried it on a class of almost 7000 enzymes that are involved in a process needed to produce the raw materials for fuels, plastics and flavors. The Kobe University team now reports that this approach allowed them to identify an enzyme that has a productivity up to ten times higher than that of the current industry standard.

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