Prof. Katharina Ribbeck speaks with New York Times reporter Nina Agrawal about her research studying the health and medical benefits of mucus. “Ribbeck’s research has shown that the sugars on mucins can effectively switch off mechanisms that the bacteria involved in strep throat or cholera, for example, or fungus in a yeast infection, use to go from innocuous to harmful,” explains Agrawal.
Plonts, a plant-based cheese company co-founded by Nathaniel Chu PhD '19, uses microbes to develop “nutritious, inexpensive and sustainable” cheese alternatives, reports Christine Hall for TechCrunch. Chu says “microbes, whether mold, bacteria or yeast, are important to create that flavor. The microbes themselves are tiny sacs of hundreds of different enzymes with many different combinations,” writes Hall.
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new technique that removes lead from water using repurposed beer yeast, reports Boston 25 News. The researchers “developed a hydrogel capsule to hold the yeast after it is cleaned, freeze-dried, and ground into a powder,” explains Boston 25. “Researchers said the yeast capsules could be modified to remove other dangerous contaminants from water, including PFAS and microplastics.”
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a filter from used brewery yeast capable of removing lead and other metals from water, reports Rich Johnson for NewsNation. “Through a process called biosorption, the yeast can bind to lead, as well as the metals commonly used in electronic components,” explains Johnson. “That, say the researchers, could be a game-changer when recycling those metals. But the more valuable impact may be the ability to filter drinking water, starting with home faucets, and eventually scaling up to serve municipal water systems.”
Prof. Katharina Ribbeck speaks with Christopher Intagliata of Scientific American’s “Science Quickly” podcast about her research exploring how mucus can treat and prevent disease. “The basic building blocks of mucus that give mucus its gooey nature are these threadlike molecules—they look like tiny bottlebrushes—that display lots and lots of sugar molecules on their backbone,” explains Ribbeck. “And these sugar molecules—we call them glycans—interact with molecules from the immune system and microbes directly. And the exact configuration and density of these sugar molecules is really important for health.”
MIT researchers have “used an algorithm to sort through millions of genomes to find new, rare types of CRISPR systems that could eventually be adapted into genome-editing tools,” writes Sara Reardon for Nature. “We are just amazed at the diversity of CRISPR systems,” says Prof. Feng Zhang. “Doing this analysis kind of allows us to kill two birds with one stone: both study biology and also potentially find useful things.”
Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotech company founded by Jason Kelly BS ’03, PhD ’08, Reshma Shetty PhD ‘08, Barry Canton PhD ’08, Austin Che PhD ’08 and Professor Tom Knight, is working to develop synthetic fragrances, reports Scott Kirsner for The Boston Globe.
SeedLabs is working with a team including the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative to test out “microbes’ capabilities in space, potentially providing important advancements for both pollution reduction on earth as well as uses for astronauts during future lunar and Maritain explorations,” reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science.
The MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is working with SeedLabs, the environmental division of Seed Health, to study how microbes perform in space. “Along with testing how the microbes perform in a zero-gravity, high UV radiation-environment, the experiment could also be the starting point to exploring a future in which astronauts have a system to recycle their plastic waste and turn it into new materials,” reports Kristin Toussaint for Fast Company.
MIT researchers have found that the number of species and the average interaction strength determine whether different ecosystems would be stable or chaotic, reports Gabriel Popkin for Science. The researchers “grew microbes together in plastic wells and increase and decrease the concentration of nutrients to manipulate how strongly the different species interacted with each other,” explains Popkin. “The more nutrients, the more the different species competed.”
Wired reporter Maggie Chen spotlights Prof. Katharina Ribbeck and her lab’s work deconstructing how glycans hidden inside mucus can work to keep specific organisms healthy. Glycans “can be beneficial – assisting in food digestion, regulating immunity, and protecting against germs – but that can be harmful if they outcompete one another or become virulent, potentially leading to infection,” writes Chen.
Forbes contributor Jeff Kart writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds that yeast, an abundant waste product from breweries, can filter out even trace amounts of lead. The researchers demonstrated that in just five minutes “a single gram of the inactive, dried yeast cells can remove up to 12 milligrams of lead in aqueous solutions with initial lead concentrations below 1 part per million.”
Forbes contributor David Bressan writes that a new study by MIT researchers proposes that oxygen began accumulating in early Earth’s atmosphere due to interactions between marine microbes and minerals in ocean sediments. The researchers hypothesize that “these interactions helped prevent oxygen from being consumed, setting off a self-amplifying process where more and more oxygen was made available to accumulate in the atmosphere,” writes Bressan.
New York Times reporter Veronique Greenwood writes that Prof. Tami Lieberman examined the human skin and found that each pore had a single variety of Cutibacterium acnes bacteria living inside. “Each person’s skin had a unique combination of strains, but what surprised the researchers most was that each pore housed a single variety of C. acnes,” writes Greenwood. “The pores were different from their neighbors, too — there was no clear pattern uniting the pores of the left cheek or forehead across the volunteers, for instance.”
New York Times reporter Steve Lohr spotlights the origin and history of MIT startup Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic biology company founded with a “shared belief that biology could be made more like computing with reusable code and standard tools instead of the bespoke experiments of traditional biology." Jason Kelly ’03, PhD ’08, one of the founders of MIT startup Ginkgo Bioworks and the company’s chief executive, explains that “the ultimate goal for Ginkgo is to make it as easy to program a cell as it is to program a computer.”