Revolutionizing the Search for Habitability

The exploration of icy ocean worlds represents a new frontier in planetary science, focusing on understanding the potential for these environments to support life. Powell-Palm’s research addresses a fundamental question in this field: under what conditions can liquid water remain stable on these distant, frozen bodies? By defining and measuring the cenotectic, the absolute lowest temperature at which a liquid remains stable under varying pressures and concentrations, the team provides a critical framework for interpreting data from planetary exploration efforts.

This study combines Powell-Palm’s expertise in cryobiology — specifically the low-temperature thermodynamics of water — initially focused on medical applications like organ preservation for transplantation, with Journaux’s expertise in planetary science and high-pressure water-ice systems. Together, they developed a framework that bridges disciplines to tackle one of the most fascinating challenges in planetary science.

“With the launch of NASA Europa Clipper, the largest planetary exploration mission ever launched, we are entering a multi-decade era of exploration of cold and icy ocean worlds. Measurements from this and other missions will tell us how deep the ocean is and its composition,” said Journaux. “Laboratory measurements of liquid stability, and notably the lowest temperature possible (the newly-defined cenotectic), combined with mission results, will allow us to fully constrain how habitable the cold and deep oceans of our solar system are, and also what their final fate will be when the moons or planets have cooled down entirely.”

A Texas A&M Legacy of Innovation in Space Research

The research was conducted at Texas A&M and led by mechanical engineering graduate student Arian Zarriz. The work reflects Texas A&M’s deep expertise in water-ice systems and tradition of excellence in space research, which spans multiple disciplines. With the recent groundbreaking of the Texas A&M Space Institute, the university is poised to play an even larger role in space exploration, providing intellectual leadership for missions pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

“The study of icy worlds is a particular priority for both NASA and the European Space Agency, as evidenced by the flurry of recent and upcoming spacecraft launches,” said Powell-Palm. “We hope that Texas A&M will help to provide intellectual leadership in this space.”

Looking Ahead

As planetary exploration missions, such as those targeting icy moons, continue to expand our understanding of the solar system, researchers at Texas A&M and beyond prepare to analyze the wealth of data they will provide. By combining experimental studies like those conducted by Powell-Palm and Journaux with the findings from these missions, scientists aim to unlock the secrets of cold, ocean-bearing worlds and evaluate their potential to harbor life.

Electron transfer, critical to processes such as cellular respiration and energy harvesting in plants, has long posed challenges to scientists due to the complex quantum interactions involved. Current computational techniques often fall short of capturing the full scope of these processes. The multidisciplinary team at Rice, including physicists, chemists and biologists, addressed these challenges by creating a programmable quantum system capable of independently controlling the key factors in electron transfer: donor-acceptor energy gaps, electronic and vibronic couplings and environmental dissipation.

Using an ion crystal trapped in a vacuum system and manipulated by laser light, the researchers demonstrated the ability to simulate real-time spin dynamics and measure transfer rates across a range of conditions. The findings not only validate key theories of quantum mechanics but also pave the way for novel insights into light-harvesting systems and molecular devices.

“This is the first time that this kind of model was simulated on a physical device while including the role of the environment and even tailoring it in a controlled way,” said lead researcher Guido Pagano, assistant professor of physics and astronomy. “It represents a significant leap forward in our ability to use quantum simulators to investigate models and regimes that are relevant for chemistry and biology. The hope is that by harnessing the power of quantum simulation, we will eventually be able to explore scenarios that are currently inaccessible to classical computational methods.”

The team achieved a significant milestone by successfully replicating a standard model of molecular electron transfer using a programmable quantum platform. Through the precise engineering of tunable dissipation, the researchers explored both adiabatic and nonadiabatic regimes of electron transfer, demonstrating how these quantum effects operate under varying conditions. Additionally, their simulations identified optimal conditions for electron transfer, which parallel the energy transport mechanisms observed in natural photosynthetic systems.

“Our work is driven by the question: Can quantum hardware be used to directly simulate chemical dynamics?” Pagano said. “Specifically, can we incorporate environmental effects into these simulations as they play a crucial role in processes essential to life such as photosynthesis and electron transfer in biomolecules? Addressing this question is significant as the ability to directly simulate electron transfer in biomolecules could provide valuable insights for designing new light-harvesting materials.”

The implications for practical applications are far-reaching. Understanding electron transfer processes at this level could lead to breakthroughs in renewable energy technologies, molecular electronics and even the development of new materials for quantum computing.

“This experiment is a promising first step to gain a deeper understanding of how quantum effects influence energy transport, particularly in biological systems like photosynthetic complexes,” said Jose N. Onuchic, study co-author, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Chair of Physics and professor of physics and astronomy, chemistry and biosciences. “The insights we gain in this type of experiment could inspire the design of more efficient light-harvesting materials.”

Peter G. Wolynes, study co-author, the D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science and professor of chemistry, biosciences and physics and astronomy, emphasized the broader significance of the findings: “This research bridges the gap between theoretical predictions and experimental verification, offering an exquisitely tunable framework for exploring quantum processes in complex systems.”

The team plans to extend its simulations to include more complex molecular systems such as those involved in photosynthesis and DNA charge transport. The researchers also hope to investigate the role of quantum coherence and delocalization in energy transfer, leveraging the unique capabilities of their quantum platform.

“This is just the beginning,” said Han Pu, co-lead author of the study and professor of physics and astronomy. “We are excited to explore how this technology can help unravel the quantum mysteries of life and beyond.”

The study’s other co-authors include graduate students Visal So, Midhuna Duraisamy Suganthi, Abhishek Menon, Mingjian Zhu and research scientist Roman Zhuravel.

This research was made possible thanks to the Welch Foundation Award C-2154, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (No. N00014-22-1-2282), a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (No. PHY-2144910), the Army Research Office (W911NF22C0012), the Office of Naval Research (No. N00014-23-1-2665), the NSF (PHY-2207283, PHY-2019745 and PHY-2210291) and the D. R. Bullard-Welch Chair at Rice (No. C0016). The authors acknowledge that this material is based upon work supported by the U.S Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics under the Early Career Award No. DE-SC0023806. The isotopes used in this research were supplied by the U.S. Department of Energy Isotope Program managed by the Office of Isotope R&D and Production.

An international team of interdisciplinary researchers, including the Canepa Research Laboratory at the University of Houston, has developed a new type of material for sodium-ion batteries that could make them more efficient and boost their energy performance — paving the way for a more sustainable and affordable energy future.

The new material, sodium vanadium phosphate with the chemical formula Na_xV₂(PO₄)₃, improves sodium-ion battery performance by increasing the energy density — the amount of energy stored per kilogram — by more than 15%. With a higher energy density of 458 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg) compared to the 396 Wh/kg in older sodium-ion batteries, this material brings sodium technology closer to competing with lithium-ion batteries.

“Sodium is nearly 50 times cheaper than lithium and can even be harvested from seawater, making it a much more sustainable option for large-scale energy storage,” said Pieremanuele Canepa, Robert Welch assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UH and lead researcher of the Canepa Lab. “Sodium-ion batteries could be cheaper and easier to produce, helping reduce reliance on lithium and making battery technology more accessible worldwide.”

From Theory to Reality

The Canepa Lab, which uses theoretical expertise and computational methods to discover new materials and molecules to help advance clean energy technologies, collaborated with the research groups headed by French researchers Christian Masquelier and Laurence Croguennec from the Laboratoire de Reáctivité et de Chimie des Solides, which is a CNRS laboratory part of the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, in Amiens France, and the Institut de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Bordeaux, Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France for the experimental work on the project. This allowed theoretical modelling to go through experimental validation.

The researchers created a battery prototype using the new material, Na_xV₂(PO₄)₃, demonstrating significant energy storage improvements. Na_xV₂(PO₄)₃, part of a group called “Na superionic conductors” or NaSICONs, is designed to let sodium ions move smoothly in and out of the battery during charging and discharging.

Unlike existing materials, it has a unique way of handling sodium, allowing it to work as a single-phase system. This means it remains stable as it releases or takes in sodium ions. This allows the NaSICON to remain stable during charging and discharging while delivering a continuous voltage of 3.7 volts versus sodium metal, higher than the 3.37 volts in existing materials.

While this difference may seem small, it significantly increases the battery’s energy density or how much energy it can store for its weight. The key to its efficiency is vanadium, which can exist in multiple stable states, allowing it to hold and release more energy.

“The continuous voltage change is a key feature,” said Canepa. “It means the battery can perform more efficiently without compromising the electrode stability. That’s a game-changer for sodium-ion technology.”

Possibilities for a Sustainable Future

The implications of this work extend beyond sodium-ion batteries. The synthesis method used to create Na_xV₂(PO₄)₃ could be applied to other materials with similar chemistries, opening new possibilities for advanced energy storage technologies. That could in turn, impact everything from more affordable, sustainable batteries to power our devices to help us transition to a cleaner energy economy.

“Our goal is to find clean, sustainable solutions for energy storage,” Canepa said. “This material shows that sodium-ion batteries can meet the high-energy demands of modern technology while being cost-effective and environmentally friendly.”

A paper based on this work was published in the journal Nature Materials. Ziliang Wang, Canepa’s former student and now a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, and Sunkyu Park, a former student of the French researchers and now a staff engineer at Samsung SDI in South Korea, performed much of the work on this project.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart failure affects nearly 7 million U.S. adults and is responsible for 14% of deaths per year. There is no cure for heart failure, though medications can slow its progression. The only treatment for advanced heart failure, other than a transplant, is pump replacement through an artificial heart, called a left ventricular assist device, which can help the heart pump blood.

“Skeletal muscle has a significant ability to regenerate after injury. If you’re playing soccer and you tear a muscle, you need to rest it, and it heals,” said Hesham Sadek, MD, PhD, director of the Sarver Heart Center and chief of the Division of Cardiology at the U of A College of Medicine — Tucson’s Department of Medicine. “When a heart muscle is injured, it doesn’t grow back. We have nothing to reverse heart muscle loss.”

Sadek led a collaboration between international experts to investigate whether heart muscles can regenerate. The study was funded through a grant awarded to Sadek by the Leducq Foundation Transatlantic Networks of Excellence Program, which brings together American and European investigators to tackle big problems.

The project began with tissue from artificial heart patients provided by colleagues at the University of Utah Health and School of Medicine led by Stavros Drakos, MD, PhD, a pioneer in left ventricular assist device-mediated recovery.

Jonas Frisén, MD, PhD, and Olaf Bergmann, MD, PhD, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, led teams in Sweden and Germany and used their own innovative method of carbon dating human heart tissue to track whether these samples contained newly generated cells.

The investigators found that patients with artificial hearts regenerated muscle cells at more than six times the rate of healthy hearts.

“This is the strongest evidence we have, so far, that human heart muscle cells can actually regenerate, which really is exciting, because it solidifies the notion that there is an intrinsic capacity of the human heart to regenerate,” Sadek said. “It also strongly supports the hypothesis that the inability of the heart muscle to ‘rest’ is a major driver of the heart’s lost ability to regenerate shortly after birth. It may be possible to target the molecular pathways involved in cell division to enhance the heart’s ability to regenerate.”

Finding better ways to treat heart failure is a top priority for Sadek and the Sarver Heart Center. This study builds on Sadek’s prior research into rest and heart muscle regeneration.

In 2011, Sadek published a paper in Science showing that while heart muscle cells actively divide in utero, they stop dividing shortly after birth to devote their energy to pumping blood through the body nonstop, with no time for breaks.

In 2014, he published evidence of cell division in patients with artificial hearts, hinting that their heart muscle cells might have been regenerating.

These findings, combined with other research teams’ observations that a minority of artificial heart patients could have their devices removed after experiencing a reversal of symptoms, led him to wonder if the artificial heart provides cardiac muscles the equivalent of bedrest in a person recovering from a soccer injury.

“The pump pushes blood into the aorta, bypassing the heart,” he said. “The heart is essentially resting.”

Sadek’s previous studies indicated that this rest might be beneficial for the heart muscle cells, but he needed to design an experiment to determine whether patients with artificial hearts were actually regenerating muscles.

“Irrefutable evidence of heart muscle regeneration has never been shown before in humans,” he said. “This study provided direct evidence.”

Next, Sadek wants to figure out why only about 25% of patients are “responders” to artificial hearts, meaning that their cardiac muscle regenerates.

“It’s not clear why some patients respond and some don’t, but it’s very clear that the ones who respond have the ability to regenerate heart muscle,” he said. “The exciting part now is to determine how we can make everyone a responder, because if you can, you can essentially cure heart failure. The beauty of this is that a mechanical heart is not a therapy we hope to deliver to our patients in the future — these devices are tried and true, and we’ve been using them for years.”

Led by Texas A&M University graduate students Samere Zade of the biomedical engineering department and Ting-Ching Wang of the chemical engineering department, an article released by the Lele Lab has uncovered new details about the mechanism behind cancer progression.

Published in Nature Communications, the article explores the influence the mechanical stiffening of the tumor cell’s environment may have on the structure and function of the nucleus.

“Cancer has proven to be a difficult disease to treat. It is extremely complex and the molecular mechanisms that enable tumor progression are not understood,” said Dr. Tanmay Lele, joint faculty in the biomedical engineering and chemical engineering departments. “Our findings shed new light into how the stiffening of tumor tissue can promote tumor cell proliferation.”

In the article, researchers reveal that when a cell is faced with a stiff environment, the nuclear lamina — scaffolding that helps the nucleus keep its shape and structure — becomes unwrinkled and taut as the cell spreads on the stiff surface. This spreading causes yes-associated protein (YAP), the protein that regulates the multiplication of cells, to move to the nucleus.

That localization can cause increased cell proliferation, which may explain the rapid growth of cancer cells in stiff environments.

“The ability of stiff matrices to influence nuclear tension and regulate YAP localization could help explain how tumors become more aggressive and perhaps even resistant to treatment in stiffened tissues,” Zade said.

These findings build on Lele’s previous discovery that the cell nucleus behaves like a liquid droplet. In that work, researchers found that a protein in the nuclear lamina called lamin A/C helps maintain the nucleus’ surface tension. In the most recent study, it was found that reducing the levels of lamin A/C decreases the localization of YAP, in turn decreasing rapid cell proliferation.

“The protein lamin A/C plays a key role here — reducing it made cells less responsive to environmental stiffness, particularly affecting the localization of a key regulatory protein (YAP) to the nucleus,” Zade explained.

Although seemingly complex and specialized, Zade and Lele believe the broader implications of their discovery may guide future treatments for cancer.

“Uncovering how matrix stiffness drives nuclear changes and regulates key pathways, like YAP signaling, opens the door to developing therapies that target these mechanical pathways,” Zade explained. “Drugs or treatments could be designed to soften the tumor environment, disrupting the physical cues that help cancer cells thrive. Lamin A/C and related nuclear mechanics could become targets for cancer treatments.”

Moving forward, the Lele Lab aims to investigate the extent to which their discoveries apply to tumors derived from patients.

For this work, the Lele Lab was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, and the National Science Foundation. Funding for this research is administered by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, the official research agency for Texas A&M Engineering.

Extreme longevity is a trait common to the right whales’ cousins, the bowheads.

Scientists working with Indigenous subsistence hunters in Utqiaġvik used chemical analysis of harvested bowhead whales to show they can live more than 200 years. Corroborating the chemical evidence, hunters have recovered 19th-century harpoon tips from bowheads taken in modern hunts.

Right whales, which are much more closely related to bowhead whales than any other species, appear to exhibit similar lifespans. Like bowheads, right whales filter feed through baleen and migrate seasonally to give birth. Whalers considered them the “right” whales to hunt due to their thick blubber, which caused them to float when killed.

The current study examined four decades of data collected by photo identification programs tracking individual whales from two species: the Southern right whale, which lives in the oceans south of the equator, and the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, found along the Atlantic coast of North America. Researchers used the data to construct survivorship curves — graphs that show the proportion of a population that survives to each age — similar to those used by insurance companies to calculate human life expectancies.

Analysis revealed that Southern right whales, once thought to live only 70 to 80 years, can exceed lifespans of 130 years, with some individuals possibly reaching 150 years. In contrast, the study found the average lifespan of the North Atlantic right whale is just 22 years, with very few individuals surviving past the age of 50.

According to University of Alaska Fairbanks associate professor Greg Breed, the stark contrast in lifespans between these two closely related species is primarily due to human impacts. Breed is the study’s lead author.

“North Atlantic whales have unusually short lifespans compared to other whales, but this isn’t because of intrinsic differences in biology, and they should live much longer,” he said. “They’re frequently tangled in fishing gear or struck by ships, and they suffer from starvation, potentially linked to environmental changes we don’t fully understand.”

Breed has spent years studying marine mammals, including seals, certain species of which can live up to 50 years, and narwhals, with lifespans of a century or more. He noted that a lack of data on whale aging led to significant underestimations of their lifespans in the past.

“We didn’t know how to age baleen whales until 1955, which was the very end of industrial whaling,” Breed said. “By the time we figured it out, there weren’t many old whales left to study. So we just assumed they didn’t live that long.”

The study has important implications for conservation efforts. “To attain healthy populations that include old animals, recovery might take hundreds of years,” Breed said. “For animals that live to be 100 or 150 and only give birth to a surviving calf every 10 years or so, slow recovery is to be expected.”

The study also underscores the importance of cultural knowledge among whale populations.

“There’s a growing recognition that recovery isn’t just about biomass or the number of individuals. It’s about the knowledge these animals pass along to the next generation,” Breed said.

“That knowledge isn’t just genetic — it’s cultural and behavioral. Older individuals teach survival skills. Younger animals learn by observing and copying the strategies of the older ones.”

The loss of older individuals disrupts this critical transfer of knowledge and can impair the survival of the young.

Breed and his colleagues intend to extend their research to other whale populations and predict whether other whale species currently thought to live around 80 years may also have much longer lifespans. They hope to learn more about how whaling affected the number of old individuals in current whale populations and predict when their numbers will recover to pre-whaling levels.

The findings, reported in Nature Communications, also solve a decades-long scientific puzzle that’s prevented drugmakers from successfully using azole antifungal drugs to treat visceral leishmaniasis, or VL.

About 30 years ago, scientists discovered the two species of single-cell parasites that cause VL, Leishmania donovani and Leishmania infantum, made the same lipid sterol, called ergosterol, as fungi proven susceptible to azoles antifungals. These azoles antifungals target a crucial enzyme for sterol biosynthesis, called CYP51.

While not fungi, both Leishmania species have biochemical similarities to fungi in their plasma membrane, where ergosterol helps maintain cellular integrity and supports a host of biological functions, much as cholesterol does in humans.

“People looked into the sterol profile of the parasites and discovered they primarily have ergosterol,” said study corresponding author Michael Zhuo Wang, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy. “This sterol is the main component of their plasma-membrane sterols. A similar case can be observed in fungi. Fungal organisms also have a high amount of ergosterol in their membranes. There was an original instinct to use antifungal azoles to try to block that pathway.”

However, scientists were unable to effectively use antifungals against VL.

“In the research lab and some of the clinical trials, some azoles worked a little bit, and some other azoles didn’t work at all,” Wang said. “I eventually focused on this sterol pathway a scientific question — if this parasite also uses ergosterol, you’d think all the antifungal azoles would work against this parasite.”

Along these lines, Wang started his independent research career as part of a group at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill called the Consortium for Parasitic Drug Development.

“We were interested in developing new drugs against neglected tropical diseases,” he said. “One of these diseases is leishmaniasis. The other one is the African sleeping sickness. Leishmaniasis, spread by a sandfly vector in warmer climates, can cause really devastating infection of internal organs such as the liver and the spleen, as well as the bone marrow.”

In his new scholarly paper, Wang and his collaborators have largely solved that longstanding scientific question. They show the parasites that cause leishmaniasis are vulnerable via a different pathway for biosynthesis of their ergosterol, known as the CYP5122A1 enzyme. Therefore, azole antifungals targeting the CYP5122A1 enzyme as well as the traditional CYP51 pathway should be much more effective at treating leishmaniasis.

“So those azoles don’t work very well against leishmania unless you have an azole that also inhibits the new pathway, the CYP5122A1,” Wang said. “Then, all of a sudden, they’re much more active against leishmania. That’s the main discovery in this study — we figured out the true drug target in leishmania. You really need to hit this new enzyme, 22A1, in order to stop the parasites.”

Wang’s lab at KU demonstrated the CYP5122A1 gene encodes an essential sterol C4-methyl oxidase in the leishmania parasite, through extensive biochemical characterization.

“This involved defining its biochemical function — what this enzyme does in terms of sterol biosynthesis,” he said. “We pinned down its biochemical function, clarifying its role in the ergosterol biosynthesis pathway.”

Already, the researchers are publishing follow-up scholarship and discovery based on their new breakthrough in understanding the sterol synthesis pathway in the parasites. They said drugmakers and researchers should be developing therapies that target CYP5122A1. These should prove more effective at helping people survive leishmaniasis, Wang said.

“This tells us how we should repurpose these existing antifungal azoles through screening against this new target,” said the KU researcher. “The ones that actually inhibit this new target should have a better chance to work against leishmania infection.”

Wang’s co-authors at the KU School of Pharmacy were doctoral students Yiru Jin and Mei Feng, who served as lead authors, and doctoral student Lingli Qin as co-author in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry; Director Chamani Perera and doctoral student Indeewara Munasinghe from KU’s Synthetic Chemical Biology Core Laboratory; Philip Gao, director of KU’s Protein Production Group; and Judy Qiju Wu, associate teaching professor of pharmacy practice.

The KU researchers were joined by Kai Zhang, Somrita Basu, Yu Ning, Robert Madden, Hannah Burks and Salma Waheed Sheikh from Texas Tech University; and Karl Werbovetz, Arline Joachim, Junan Li and April Joice from The Ohio State University.

This study was supported in part by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the U.S. Department of Defense and the KU Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE).