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2021 – Breakthrough of the Year

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one from Science

"In his 1972 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, American biochemist Christian Anfinsen laid out a vision: One day it would be possible, he said, to predict the 3D structure of any protein merely from its sequence of amino acid building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body alone, such an advance would have vast applications, offering insights into basic biology and revealing promising new drug targets. Now, after nearly 50 years, researchers have shown that artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software can churn out accurate protein structures by the thousands—an advance that realizes Anfinsen’s dream and is Science’s 2021 Breakthrough of the Year."

Video below has more, and the runner ups

Digital Nose

“What the camera did for vision, we’re now doing for smell,” Agahi says. “I believe we are the first company to build a smell camera on the smell sidewalk.” The difference with Koniku’s “camera” is that the purple encasement contains tiny living nerve cells.

They’re suspended inside a proprietary solution designed to replicate the mucosa, the layer of membrane high up in our nasal cavities. The cells contain specific transmembrane proteins programmed to recognize odor molecules, precisely as those in our nose would catch a whiff. The reaction triggers a cascade of signaling events, eventually leading to a chip reader that interprets which receptors were triggered. And there you have it: the authentic recognition of an odor.

Businessweek (sub required)

Skyscrapers inspired by sea sponges

The next generation of skyscrapers could be, well, spongey. Researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences say a lattice reinforced with diagonals, inspired by the structures built by sponges, could mean lighter, but stronger skyscrapers and bridges.

Popular Mechanics

Video on how biomimicry increasingly influences design in many fields

The scaling of synthetic biology

The synthetic biology revolution isn’t just about what scientists can do, but how they can do it. The growing use of automation at a biotech company like Ginkgo is an example of a trend called “deskilling.” With each passing year, the scientific expertise needed to pull off a specific experiment in synthetic biology falls. What might have recently required the hard work of a postdoctoral student can now be done by undergraduates, and might soon show up in an ambitious high school student’s science fair project. Synthetic biology is getting easier, faster and cheaper, which means more and more people can do it. And as it does, the information hazard—the risk that comes from the dissemination of potentially dangerous knowledge—accumulates.

Deskilling has helped Ginkgo design and produce more than 10,000 genes per month, as synthetic biology shifts from an artisanal practice carried out in the laboratory by highly trained experts to a real industry. Everything is sped up, allowing researchers to design an organism, build it, test it, analyze the test and then start the whole cycle over and over again. “Things that would have made a great PhD thesis a few years back can now be done by people in two weeks here,” Ms. Agapakis said.

WSJ

Robotic Tail

In addition to the benefits that an artificial tail could provide to the elderly—or younger people who may have some mobility issues or problems with their balance—the researchers are also studying ways their device can help the working population. For example, they are looking at ways it can help stabilize warehouse and factory workers who are prone to heavy lifting and carrying.

Newsweek

 

 

The latest US National Park

We looked west and saw a series of industrial buildings and piers from Gary, Indiana, and the Port of Indiana. In the distance, about 30 miles northwest, we could see Chicago’s skyline, a floating silhouette on the lake’s horizon. To the east, an excavator worked along the beach near a handful of sunbathers. We had heard its mechanical churning while we hiked, along with the hum of trains and traffic in the distance.

But directly in front of us, the yellow sand beach stretched untouched, a sliver of wild backed by marram grass and spindly oaks on steep dunes. Water from Lake Michigan lapped lazily against the sandy shore, and a refreshing breeze cooled my face.

“Here we are, this ecologically diverse place, where you can literally see Chicago from the beach, this juxtaposition of this great natural place in the midst of this giant city infrastructure is mind-boggling,” Paul Labovitz, the park’s superintendent, said over the phone later as he surveyed the same scene.

Chicago Sun Times

Here is a video on the history to make this a National Park

 

 

 

An acceleration in biomimicry

Other neuroscientists are studying zebra finches’ songcraft. Some are becoming expert in the electrical conductivity of sheep skulls. Still more are opting for the classics of high school biology: fruit flies, whose neural setup is relatively simple to behold, or worms, who wring considerable juice from their few neurons. Over the past few years, technology companies have been raiding universities to hire away such people. Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all hired doctoral candidates from one of Mathis’s recent fellowship programs, she says. “The Ph.D. students would have jobs before they got their degrees.”

 

Animals have long played important roles in advancing corporate science, of course, particularly for medical treatments. But the leap required to translate insights from the zebra finch’s sound-processing anatomy into Siri’s voice-recognition software—or mouse gaming into a future when Amazon.com Inc. runs all-android warehouses—is of an entirely different order. With whole new industries at stake, the race to unlock the secrets of the animal mind is getting weird.

BusinessWeek

 

 

 

Increasing crop productivity

1. South, along with colleagues from the University of Illinois, have now found a way to reduce this “glitch” by creating a new pathway through which photorespiration can happen. Instead of being a long, energy intensive process, the team created a “shortcut” to reduce the amount of energy it used. They tested out the technique on tobacco plants and found production was boosted by up to 40 percent. Their findings are published in the journal Science.

Tobacco plants were used as a model system because they are easy to manipulate genetically, have a fast life cycle and produce lots of seeds. “Now that we have achieved proof of concept, we are moving this technique into food crops for testing and because photosynthesis and photorespiration are highly conserved amongst plant species the benefits observed in tobacco should show an effect in other crops,” South said. They now plan to carry out field trials with potato plants. They will also start creating new pathway designs for crops like cowpea, soybean, rice, and tomato. South said it will probably take about 10 years before these crops make it to dinner plates because of regulatory restrictions. However, if trials are successful, these engineered plants could help curb the problem of food security.

Newsweek

 

 

Animal-inspired robots

Cockroaches can react in 1⁄50 of a second and skitter 25 body lengths per second—the equivalent of a car going 280 mph. In one test, a roach survived being squished by a mechanical press at some 900 times its body weight. The invincible bug was the model for a crushable robot made from laminated paper and weighing just 50 grams. The device can squeeze into crevices half its height—suggesting potential in search and rescue missions.

Wired

 

Wolves for Yellowstone

The reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park is the most celebrated ecological experiment in history. As predicted by population models, the rapid recovery of a wolf population caused both temporal and spatial variability in wolf–ungulate interactions that likewise generated temporal and spatial variation in the expression of trophic cascades. This has amplified spatial variation in vegetation in Yellowstone, particularly with willow (Salix spp.) and cottonwood (Populus spp.) in riparian areas, with associated changes in food webs. Increasing influences of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos), cougars (Puma concolor), and bison (Bison bison) are making what initially was predominantly an elk–wolf interaction into an increasingly complex system. Outside Yellowstone, however, humans have a dominant influence in western North America that overwhelms trophic cascades resulting in what appear to be bottom-up influences on community structure and function. Complex and unexpected ecosystem responses to wolf recovery in Yellowstone reinforce the value of national parks and other protected areas as ecological baseline reserves.

Journal of Mammalogy