A bacterial warrior the only one of its kind? This enzyme is "wacko" in many ways in its breakdown of a poison related to TNT. On top of that, 5NAA-A is known so far only to exist in a single living organism on Earth. Could it be the lone master of a rare bacterial enzymatic kung fu, in the war on potatoes? Or does a genomic clue point to its existence in one other solitary case?

Unique Bacterial Chemist in the War on Potatoes

Atlanta, GA

A bacterial warrior the only one of its kind? This enzyme is "wacko" in the ways it breaks down a poison related to TNT.

Aaron Blanchard and Khalid Salaita, associate professor of chemistry at Emory. 

Collegiate Inventors Competition Selects Georgia Tech/Emory Team as 2016 finalists

Atlanta, GA

The Collegiate Inventors Competition has selected a team of two Georgia Tech and Emory graduate students as finalists in its 2016 annual competition.

Images from the Encyclopedia of Life. Photo credits: Robertpollai, CC-BY; A. Fifis/Ifremer, CC-BY-NC; Kevin Raskoff & MPC, CC-BY-NC-SA; Sean McCann, CC-BY-NC-SA; Nick Hobgood, CC-BY-NC  

Addressing Environmental Challenges with Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

Atlanta, GA

NSF funding to link technologies from Georgia Tech, Smithsonian and IBM to study environment.

The schizophrenia simulator is a well-ordered, fine-tuned labyrinth of data from thousands of studies mathed with differential equations to be highly accurate. But the output to users is simple and playful -- a rainbow-colored mobile that displays the dynamics of the brain chemicals' interplay.

Schizophrenia Simulator: When Chemistry Upends Sanity's Balance

Atlanta, GA

Working memory disturbances wreck the mental coherence of schizophrenia sufferers, yet treatments for it are very limited. Biomedical engineers have built an accurate simulator of the brain chemistry behind it to help drug developers change that.

Patrick McGrath holds up dishes with two lab strains of the C. elegans roundworm. Strain LSJ2 (dish on right) dramatically changed its survival strategy to live longer and have fewer offspring due to a tiny mutation on its NURF-1 gene. Researchers at Georgia Tech confirmed the effects of the mutation by duplicating it in lab strain N2 (dish on left) via an injection with CRISPR Cas9. 

Insights on Sex and Death from a Mutant Roundworm

Atlanta, GA

Do genetic regulators guide survival strategies in hard times? A tiny mutation in a roundworm says they may well.

Researchers studied the motion of mudskippers to understand how early terrestrial animals might have moved about on mud and sand, including sandy slopes. This animal was photographed at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.  (Credit: Rob Felt, Georgia Tech)

Robot Helps Study How First Land Animals Moved 360 Million Years Ago

Atlanta, GA

A new study used a robot to help understand how the first land animals moved about.

Researchers Phil Santangelo and Eric Alonas with a spinning disk confocal microscope used to image cells. Santangelo is a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; Alonas is a Georgia Tech graduate student. (Credit: John Toon, Georgia Tech)

Tiny Mirror Improves Microscope Resolution for Studying Cells

Atlanta, GA

A tiny mirror could make a huge difference for scientists trying to understand what’s happening in the micron-scale structures of living cells.

This illustration shows the merger of two black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward as the black holes spiral toward each other. The black holes—which represent those detected by LIGO on Dec. 26, 2015—were 14 and 8 times the mass of the sun, until they merged, forming a single black hole 21 times the mass of the sun. In reality, the area near the black holes would appear highly warped, and the gravitational waves would be difficult to see directly. Image credit: LIGO/T. Pyle

Gravitational Waves Detected Again

Atlanta, GA

Second Gravitational Wave detected by LIGO, which includes Georgia Tech researchers.

A tailor-made ratiometric sensor makes a baker's yeast cell light up green, as Georgia Tech scientists use it to track the movements of the essential toxin heme.

Heme, a Poisonous Nutrient, Tracked by ‘Green Lantern’ Sensor

Atlanta, GA

Tracking heme has dispelled a widely held assumption that it does not float freely in cellular pools.

Georgia Tech mathematicians Xingxing Yu, Yan Wang and Dawei He have offered a proof of the Kelmans-Seymour Conjecture nearly 40 years after Princeton Mathematician Paul Seymour made it in 1977.

40-Year Math Mystery and Four Generations of Figuring

Atlanta, GA

In social media and much computer technology, a field of math called Graph Theory is used to make networks work. Georgia Tech mathematicians have solved a 40-year Graph Theory mystery.