In the 1860s, the chemists, Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Mendeleev, independently presented the first periodic system. Since then, the well-known tabular arrangement of the elements has been the guiding principle of chemistry. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the…
Researchers in the groups of Prof. Tobias Gulder from TU Dresden and Prof. Tanja Gulder from Leipzig University have succeeded in understanding the biosynthetic mechanisms for the production of the natural product cyanobacterin, which in Nature is produced in small quantities by the cyanobacteria…
Plastic bottles, punnets, wrap – such lightweight packaging made of PET plastic becomes a problem if it is not recycled. Scientists at Leipzig University have now discovered a highly efficient enzyme that degrades PET in record time. The enzyme PHL7, which the researchers found in a compost heap in…
The chemist Dr. Jonas Warneke from Leipzig University (PI in the Research Training Group 2721: Hydrogen Isotopes, ¹²³H) receives the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis 2022. The prize, which is awarded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and the Federal Ministry of…
Researchers at Leipzig University have succeeded in moving tiny amounts of liquid at will by remotely heating water over a metal film with a laser. The currents generated in this way can be used to manipulate and even capture tiny objects. This will unlock groundbreaking new solutions for…
Highly reactive molecules cannot survive for long in nature. If researchers want to study them more closely, they therefore have to be produced under very specific laboratory conditions. Compared to “normal” molecules, many of these tiny particles have a distinguishing feature: they simply bind with…