Researchers from the University of Seville (US) and the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) have demonstrated that it is possible to grow tomatoes and generate solar energy simultaneously, a key strategy for tackling global water scarcity. The study, carried out in Madrid and Seville during the spring of 2024, evaluated the use of agrovoltaic systems and regulated deficit irrigation to optimize water resources in tomato cultivation. The results show that, although using less water reduces the volume of the harvest, the overall outcome is a more efficient and sustainable process.

This innovative combination aims to reduce the plants’ evaporative demand through the shade provided by photovoltaic panels, enabling a more efficient use of land and water. The research compared three irrigation methods: a control group with full irrigation, a regulated deficit irrigation (RDI) system based on the plant’s water status, and an agrovoltaic (AG) system that applied the same water restriction under solar panels. The study measured variables such as leaf water potential and gas exchange to monitor plant stress at different growth stages. The results indicate that, although the shade from the panels reduces available radiation, the design of the system permits adequate plant development to be maintained at most stages of the crop cycle.

One of the most notable findings is that the deficit irrigation strategy reduced water consumption by approximately 50% compared to traditional irrigation. However, this drastic reduction in water led to a yield decrease of around 20% in the RDI treatment, attributed mainly to severe water stress conditions during the ripening phase. Despite this drop in total tomato production, irrigation water productivity increased significantly in the Seville treatments, demonstrating that more fruit can be obtained for every drop of water invested.

Furthermore, the overall success of the agrovoltaic system was validated by the Land Equivalent Ratio (LER), which combines the efficiency of agricultural and electricity production. The values obtained—1.54 in Madrid and 1.67 in Seville—confirm that combined production is far more efficient than growing tomatoes and generating energy on separate plots. This implies that, although tomato yield decreases under the panels, the system’s profitability and sustainability increase thanks to the generation of clean energy in the same space.

In conclusion, the study highlights that agrovoltaics is a promising tool for the agriculture of the future, although it requires more precise irrigation management to avoid excessive stress. The researchers suggest that combining plant measurements with soil moisture sensors could further optimize these systems. This advance points to the sustainable dual use of land, offering a viable solution to the challenges of climate change and the energy transition.

The results are published in Agricultural Water Management.

Cancer cells excel at evading detection, but subtle chemical differences set them apart from healthy cells. Now, a team of scientists from Wageningen University & Research and Van Andel Institute has identified a way to exploit this distinction. Using a variant of CRISPR, a modern tool for editing DNA, they distinguished tumor DNA from healthy DNA and selectively cut only the former.

The study, published in Nature, is an early but promising step toward a cancer therapy that targets and destroys tumor cells with high precision.

The new method relies on methyl groups, small chemical tags attached to DNA that regulate whether genes are on or off. This process, called DNA methylation, is altered in cancer cells and can act as a molecular “fingerprint” that differentiates malignant cells from healthy ones.

Precision gene editing with ThermoCas9

The team conducted the study using ThermoCas9, a CRISPR variant discovered in bacteria several years ago by Wageningen’s John van der Oost, Ph.D. Like other CRISPR systems, researchers can program ThermoCas9 to locate and cut specific sections of DNA within a cell.

VAI’s Hong Li, Ph.D., and her lab analyzed ThermoCas9’s structure and found that it can distinguish between unmethylated and methylated genes.

The team then introduced ThermoCas9 into human cells grown in culture dishes: healthy cells in one set of dishes and tumor cells in another set of dishes. This approach worked: ThermoCas9 cut DNA in tumor cells while leaving healthy DNA intact. The system therefore proved capable of detecting the subtle chemical differences between healthy and tumor cells and acting on them.

“ThermoCas9 is the first CRISPR-associated enzyme to respond to differences in the most abundant type of DNA methylation in human and other eukaryotic cells,” Van der Oost said. “This means we now have a system that we can target specifically toward tumor cells.”

The study represents the first time a CRISPR-based method has relied on methylation to target human cancer cells.

“ThermoCas9 uses methylation like an address to precisely target cancer cells while leaving healthy cells untouched,” Li said. “The findings could be a game changer.”

A precise molecular fit

The explanation for ThermoCas9’s selective behavior lies in the way it binds to DNA. Before a CRISPR system cuts DNA, it must first attach to a short recognition sequence next to its target, known as the PAM (Protospacer Adjacent Motif). ThermoCas9 is unique in that its PAM sequence includes a human methylation site, meaning it can contain a methyl group.

“The CRISPR system binds very precisely to this recognition code,” Van der Oost explained.

Compare it to a screwdriver that fits perfectly into a matching screw head. If there is a protrusion inside the groove, the screwdriver no longer fits, nor is it capable of performing its job. In the same way, a methyl group disrupts the fit between ThermoCas9 and the DNA, preventing binding and leaving the DNA sequence untouched.

“ThermoCas9 is a perfect example of the value of fundamental research; you have to know how these individual pieces work together,” Li said. “We used biochemistry and structural biology to discover a mechanism that we one day hope will lead to more precise, effective cancer treatment.”

Steps toward clinical research

There is still a long way to go before the technology can be translated into a potential cancer treatment. The new study demonstrates selective DNA cleavage but does not yet show that this effect can kill tumor cells. The next step focuses on damaging tumor DNA sufficiently to trigger cell death.

Aberrant methylation patterns also play a role in many other diseases, including childhood cancers such as neuroblastoma and autoimmune disorders. In the future, ThermoCas9 or a similar CRISPR tool may evolve into a versatile molecular strategy that recognizes diseased cells by their chemical “signature” and selectively disables them.

A new analytical method could improve how cancer treatments are designed—by allowing scientists to track, for the first time, exactly where inside a living cell a drug accumulates. Researchers from the University of Surrey and King’s College London developed the method, which detects trace amounts of metal inside individual living cells and their internal compartments without the need to kill the cells first.

Published in Spectrochimica Acta Part B: Atomic Spectroscopy, the study looked at a class of cancer therapy called targeted radionuclide therapy. This works by attaching a radioactive particle to a molecule that seeks out tumor cells, delivering radiation directly to the cancer. Where inside the cell the drug ends up is critical. A drug that reaches the nucleus causes damage to cancer by targeting DNA. Until now, there was no reliable way to measure this in living cells.

Dr. Monica Felipe-Sotelo, senior lecturer in radiochemistry and analytical chemistry, co-author of the study from the University of Surrey, said, “We developed this method using two specialist facilities—the SEISMIC facility at King’s College London and the University of Surrey’s ICP-MS facility. Together, they allowed us to combine the cell-sampling and metal-detection steps in a single workflow for the first time. That combination is what makes it possible to ask not just whether a drug gets into a cell, but precisely where it goes once it’s there.”

The team used tiny glass capillary tips—10 micrometers wide for whole cells, 3 micrometers for subcellular structures—to extract individual living pancreatic cancer cells and material from within them, including mitochondria, under a microscope.

The SEISMIC facility at King’s, a specialist system for extracting material from single living cells, provided the sampling capability. Surrey’s laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) facility then enabled detection and measurement of thallium present using LA-ICP-MS—a technique that uses a laser to vaporize minute quantities of material before a mass spectrometer identifies and quantifies the metals within. The combination of capillary sampling at the sub-cellular level and LA-ICP-MS has not been performed before.

The researchers used thallium chloride as a chemically stable stand-in for thallium-201, a radioactive isotope under investigation as a cancer treatment candidate. Thallium was successfully detected in individual cancer cells and, for the first time, inside mitochondria-enriched material extracted from those cells, at extremely low amounts.

Dr. Claire Davison from King’s College London, said, “Thallium-201 is exciting as a potential cancer therapy precisely because its radiation acts over such a short distance—which means it could destroy tumor cells while sparing the healthy tissue around them. But that precision cuts both ways: the drug has to end up in the right part of the cell to do its job. This method gives us, for the first time, a way to find that out in living cells, and that is a significant step towards making this type of therapy work in practice.”

Dr. Dany Beste, senior lecturer in microbial metabolism from the University of Surrey, said, “The potential here goes well beyond cancer. Metals play important roles in a wide range of diseases—from infectious disease to diabetes and liver conditions—and we have few tools for studying exactly where they are accumulating within cells. This methodology gives us a way to do that with a level of precision and in conditions that are much closer to biological reality. That opens up a lot of questions we could not previously ask.”

Professor Melanie Bailey from King’s College London said, “We are continuing to develop this methodology at the SEISMIC facility and working with various different users to determine precisely where other drugs go when they enter cells, and what they do when they get there.”

The technique could be extended beyond cancer research to study how any metal-based drug or toxic substance distributes inside living cells. The team identified the extraction of additional cellular compartments—including the nucleus, where radiation damage to DNA occurs—as a key next step. Improving methods to verify the purity of the extracted subcellular material is also identified as a priority for future development.

Nutrients recovered from animal and human waste could drastically reduce synthetic fertilizer use in the U.S., according to a new Cornell University study that takes into account real-world implementation challenges like processing and transport.

In the study in Nature Sustainability, researchers found that animal and human waste in the U.S. could theoretically meet 102% of nitrogen and 50% of phosphorus needs for the nation’s agriculture, a value of more than $5.7 billion annually. But they also identified a major hurdle: a frequent mismatch between the location of the waste—often in areas densely populated with people or livestock—and agricultural regions with the highest fertilizer needs.

Still, by mapping and analyzing the sources of waste and of agricultural need, the research team found that large percentages of recoverable nutrients—37% of nitrogen and 46% of phosphorus—can be used locally, and more than half of the surplus nutrients can be redistributed to nearby regions with low economic and environmental costs.

“This is a coordination problem, not a resource problem,” said corresponding author and assistant professor Chuan Liao. “Even considering the real-world constraints, there’s still a substantial amount of nutrients that can be economically redistributed to meet crop needs.”

The research provides a blueprint for harnessing the vast, untapped potential of animal and human waste to reduce the U.S.’s reliance on synthetic fertilizers, which are energy-intensive to produce, harmful to the environment and often made overseas.

“Excessive use of synthetic fertilizers leads to water pollution, and the production itself generates more emissions—it’s a very intensive process,” Liao said. “And you can see with the Iran War, there are supply-chain issues that can lead to great food insecurity as well.”

Using publicly available data, the researchers mapped potential sources of human and animal waste as well as the need for nutrients across 15 major crops, at a resolution of around 10 kilometers.

Nutrient surpluses occurred in population-dense areas and livestock-intensive regions, such as the Northeast and parts of the West respectively, while deficits persisted in the Midwest and southern Great Plains. The researchers then analyzed the potential for redistributing nutrients, given the costs of both processing and transportation.

The team found that areas of very high or very low nutrient supply often overlapped with poorer counties, where people are more vulnerable to food insecurity and have worse overall health outcomes. Liao said pollution could be a factor: In surplus regions, more waste washes into bodies of water, and in areas of low-nutrient supply, farmers rely more on synthetic fertilizers, which can degrade soil and pollute water as well.

“The nutrient inequality seems to mirror social inequality in a large sense,” Liao said. “So potentially fixing the nutrient flow can promote environmental justice.”

Liao said the best approach to scale the use of waste in U.S. agriculture is to take advantage of opportunities at the local level. He gave the example of a pig farm in the middle of miles of corn fields: With the right infrastructure and incentives, waste from the pig farm could be used to satisfy the nutrient-hungry corn fields right next door.

“We’re advocating for a decentralized system, so that waste can be processed locally,” Liao said. “But in order to do this, we need to coordinate across different sectors, such as agriculture, waste and energy. The technology is there, but we need governance and infrastructure to scale up to the entire U.S.”

The study is part of a larger research program exploring the feasibility of using human and animal waste as fertilizer globally, with co-authors Rebecca Nelson, professor in CALS’ School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS), and Johannes Lehmann, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor at SIPS.

An international team led by researchers at QUT has used artificial intelligence to create tiny “smart” proteins that switch on only when they detect a chosen target. Published in Nature Biotechnology, the research opens the way to a new generation of low-cost biosensors for medicine, environmental monitoring and biotechnology.

The team showed that these AI-designed protein switches could work inside living bacterial cells and could also be linked to electrodes to generate an electrical signal, similar in principle to glucose meters.

Lead author Professor Kirill Alexandrov, from the QUT School of Biology and Environmental Science and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, explained that proteins are the molecular machines that allow living cells to sense changes in their environment and respond.

“One of the major goals of synthetic biology is to build protein systems that can detect molecules of interest and then trigger a useful response,” Professor Alexandrov said. “Until recently, protein engineers were mostly limited to adapting natural proteins found in biology. That gave us only a small set of starting options and made it very difficult to design new sensors on demand. Our study shows that AI-designed proteins can be turned into effective molecular switches, greatly expanding what protein engineers can build.”

The researchers used machine learning-designed binding proteins as artificial receptors and connected them to enzymes capable of producing easily measurable outputs. These outputs included color changes, light emission and electrical signals, making the switches suitable for different types of sensing technologies.

Importantly, the work also challenges a long-held idea in protein science.

“It was widely believed that sensing proteins had to undergo large shape changes to function as switches,” Professor Alexandrov said. “We found that these artificial receptors do not need a dramatic structural rearrangement. Instead, binding of the target molecule subtly changes how the protein moves, and that is enough to turn activity on. That gives us new insight into how natural protein regulation works and provides a powerful new strategy for designing useful biosensors.”

In the study, the team built switches that responded to small molecules, peptides and proteins. They also demonstrated electrochemical biosensors for steroid detection and showed that the switches could operate in living cells, an important step towards future synthetic biology applications.

The technology could eventually support portable diagnostic devices, environmental sensing systems and engineered cells that respond intelligently to chemical signals.

The work brought together researchers from seven teams across Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, including collaborators from the University of Washington led by 2024 Nobel Prize laureate Professor David Baker, and CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.