Public events @ S³ 2024

Biomedicine, artistically described, looks like a magical archipelago offering perennial sources for challenging discoveries. The only way to discern and carve them into safe and efficient tools is the hopping between vivid, intertwined, and medley scientific islands. Many of them belong to the biochemistry group. The lecturer, a medical biochemist, will take you for a short tour of some of the biochemistry islands he recognizes as the personal research pearls.  At every tour stop, the lecturer/guide will share a personal collaborating experience with peers from the neighboring scientific islands. The first tour point will show you the biochemical contribution in the management of a hereditary condition predisposing to lung and liver diseases, α1-antitrypsin deficiency. Here, our peers from the neighboring scientific islands will be physicians and molecular biologists. After that, we will arrive at the veterinary medicine setting to glimpse into the biochemical aspects of canine vector-borne diseases. Our next destination will be again human laboratory diagnostics, but this time to acquaint a new approach to measuring antithyroglobulin antibodies developed in synergy with chemists. The tour will finish in the exclusive province of researching glycans, complex oligosaccharides structurally and functionally “decorating” proteins, lipids, and RNAs. Here we will intersect with peers from the comprehensive net of research islands such as chemistry, molecular biology, data science, medicine, and biotechnology. Instead of an official farewell, the tour will end with tips for those interested in navigating their tours through the Biomedicine archipelago.

It is common knowledge that the water molecule is V-shaped, we see the DNA helix so many times on TV, some people even have a caffeine molecule as a tattoo... But how do we know what these molecules look like if they are impossible to see with the naked eye or even a microscope? What techniques do scientists use to find out this information and why is it important to know? We can learn so much about chemical interactions once we know the structure of molecules; we can understand why water is so essential for life on Earth, find out how a living cell works or what drugs do to heal a patient. Our knowledge is currently so great and computers so powerful that we can even do research without beakers and laboratories, just by modelling systems computationally. Bioinformatics and molecular modeling, supported with AI and machine learning, are very powerful tools. They implement prior knowledge with which we can find unknown genes in DNA, predict the 3D structure of proteins knowing only their amino acid sequence, and understand whether a potential drug will work just by simulating its interaction with the target. In this lecture, you will learn what experimental techniques we use to determine the structure of molecules and how we later use this data to understand molecular systems at the smallest levels of intermolecular interaction. We will go through an example of a DNA binding protein which only has its crystal structure known. We will find gene sequence that protein binds, build the DNA molecule in 3D, dissolve both protein and DNA in water and let them interact. And all of that without even putting on a lab coat, only with a little help of a (super)computer.

Chemical reactions in solution are the traditional approach to synthesizing numerous chemical compounds. Solvents make up as much as 80-90% of the mass of material used in the preparation of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), but the same is true for other types of chemical industry. The development of new synthesis methods that would reduce the use of often harmful and dangerous solvents is of great importance both for scientific research and for industrial processes. As a greener alternative to solvent-based reactions, chemical transformations in the solid-state have drawn increasing attention among chemists due to the unique benefits that the solid-state methods provide in terms of sustainability, reaction times, yields, solubility, selectivity, and chemical reactivity. Mechanochemistry, i.e., the performance of chemical reactions induced by direct absorption of mechanical energy, has proven to be a more environmentally friendly, solvent-free approach used for synthesizing existing or new chemicals. In this lecture, we will discuss the main points of green chemistry with a focus on mechanochemistry and try to conclude whether the chemistry without the solvents is a realistic future or just a myth.

Join us for an engaging and empowering presentation where you'll uncover the secret sauce to thriving in every aspect of your life. Speak Up and Shine - Master the art of assertive communication with professors, parents, and peers to achieve your goals. X Factor Unleashed - Discover the secret sauce to making amazing friends and effortlessly talking to your crush. Mastering the Balance - Learn how to conquer lack of motivation, burnout, and parental pressure while still enjoying your passions. Get ready to unlock your potential, build incredible relationships, and balance life like a pro!

Fibre-optic deformation sensing provides new opportunities for seismic data acquisition with high spatio-temporal resolution. The relative ease of deploying fibre-optic cables, or the possibility to piggyback on existing telecom infrastructure make this technology particularly attractive for environments where large numbers of conventional seismic instruments may be difficult to install. These include active volcanoes, glaciers or densely populated urban centres. In the first, more observational part of this talk, we will present a series of case studies where Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) greatly improved the location of glacial icequakes and our knowledge of ice sheet structure, enabled the observation of previously unknown volcanic tremor and resonance phenomena, and increased the number of detected seismic events by two orders of magnitude – all relative to data from existing seismometer networks. In the second, more theoretical part, we will report on the development of two novel fibre-optic sensing systems based on the transmission of laser pulses that enable interrogation distances of thousands of kilometres. While the first system exploits microwave-frequency signals, the second system co-uses the active noise cancellation in metrological frequency dissemination. For these kinds of transmission systems, we show that different segments of the fibre can have different sensitivities for deformation sensing, largely depending on fibre curvature. Data from a large-scale experiment support this theory and demonstrate that transmission-based systems can constrain earthquake source mechanisms using only a single time series.