New technology uses laser ablation — the use of laser pulses to vaporize small amounts of material — to test for hazardous wastes and explosives while generating almost no chemical waste. The technology can save the lives of soldiers, keep children safe from toys illegally coated with lead paints, and protect workers from chemical poisoning.

By programming cells with short lengths of synthetic DNA on their surfaces, scientists at the Molecular Foundry control how different cell types bind together to form complex artificial microtissues for potential uses in medicine and in medical and biological research.

Glycans are sugars that occur throughout living things and are particularly abundant on the surfaces of cells. Carolyn Bertozzi has developed a series of techniques to manipulate these ubiquitous biomolecules; one of the most intriguing uses lies in imaging. In spectacular recent experiments, Bertozzi and her colleagues tracked glycans moving and rearranging themselves in developing zebrafish.

“Aldehyde tags” invented by Berkeley Lab scientists are used to label proteins in bacterial recombinant-DNA systems — and now in proteins that can only be expressed by mammalian recombinant-DNA systems. While some recombinant drugs like insulin are made in bacterial systems, most have to be produced by mammalian cells. Aldehyde tags direct chemical modifications to specific sites on proteins, including monoclonal antibodies and other therapeutics important in the pharmaceutical industry.

Individual nanocrystals are remarkably strong. But under stress, complex nanostructures quickly fail because of internal strains. New research at the National Center for Electron Microscopy on hollow nanospheres shows that engineering can greatly increase the strength of complex nanoparticles. The results could lead to stronger nanostructures and large-scale alloys as well.

Some meteorites and other objects from the early solar system have quite different ratios of oxygen isotopes than those found on Earth. Isotope self-shielding, however, a popular explanation for this difference, failed to explain isotope ratios in recent work at the Advanced Light Source.