Highlights

Every year, a committee of experts sits down with a tough job to do: from among all ICREA publications, they must find a handful that stand out from all the others. This is indeed a challenge. The debates are sometimes heated and always difficult but, in the end, a shortlist of  the most outstanding publications of the year is produced. No prize is awarded, and the only additional acknowledge is the honour of being chosen and highlighted by ICREA. Each piece has something unique about it, whether it be a particularly elegant solution, the huge impact it has in the media or the sheer fascination it generates as a truly new idea. For whatever the reason, these are the best of the best and, as such, we are proud to share them here.

LIST OF SCIENTIFIC HIGHLIGHTS

Format: yyyy

  • Nanocellulose photonic architectures: versatile, ecofriendly, biocompatible and low cost. (2018)

    Goñi, Alejandro R. (CSIC - ICMAB)

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    Nanocellulose photonic architectures: versatile, ecofriendly, biocompatible and low cost.

    Cellulose and its derivatives have gained renewed interest as favorable alternatives to conventional plastics, due to their abundance and lower environmental impact. Cellulose is probably the most interesting biopolymer because it is abundant on Earth and for centuries has had a wide technological relevance in areas such as textiles, packaging and knowledge storage. Cellulose is a polysaccharide that results from the repetition of glucose units. It consists of fibers with dimensions of 2 to 4 mm in length and 2 to 200 microns in diameter. By appropriate processing it is possible to obtain cellulose nanoparticles which form nanocellulose. The typical arrangement of cellulose microfibers scatters light diffusively, providing the well-known white color of paper. Nanocellulose instead can form compact and transparent films or colorful optically active ones, depending on the amorphous or crystalline arrangement of the nanoparticles. Hydroxypropyl cellulose (HPC) is just a nanocellulose derivative which is water soluble and particularly suitable for soft imprinting methods.

    We succeeded for the first time to fabricate photonic and plasmonic structures by molding hydroxypropyl cellulose into sub-micrometric periodic lattices, using low-cost soft lithography. This is an alternative way to achieve structural color in this material (see Fig. 1). Cellulose-based photonic crystals are biocompatible and can be dissolved in water or not, depending on the derivative employed. Patterned cellulose membranes exhibit tunable colors and may be used to boost the light emission properties of a host organic dye. Furthermore, we demonstrated how metal coating these cellulose photonic architectures leads to plasmonic crystals with excellent optical properties acting as disposable surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrates for ultra-sensitive optical characterization. Essentially, we proposed an alternative route to easily provide cellulose derivatives with an optical functionality, enabling the fabrication of cellulose-based two-dimensional photonic structures with sub-micrometer features with great potential in a variety of photonic applications, as illustrated in Fig. 2.

  • A light activated anticancer drug to better aim chemotherapy and reduce side effects (2018)

    Gorostiza Langa, Pau (IBEC)

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    A light activated anticancer drug to better aim chemotherapy and reduce side effects

    The efficacy and tolerability of anticancer drugs are limited by their side effects. Controlling the activity of these drugs in space and time would allow improving chemotherapy treatments, and light-regulated drugs are well suited to this purpose. We have developed phototrexate, the first photoswitchable inhibitor of the human dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), as an analogue of methotrexate, a widely prescribed chemotherapeutic drug to treat cancer and psoriasis. Quantification of the light-regulated DHFR enzymatic activity, cell proliferation, and in vivo effects in zebrafish show that phototrexate behaves as a potent antifolate in its photoactivated cis configuration and that it is nearly inactive in its dark-relaxed trans form. Thus, phototrexate constitutes a proof-of-concept to design light-regulated cytotoxic small molecules and a step forward to develop anticancer chemotherapies with localized efficacy and reduced adverse effects.

  • Long distance currents between proteins in water   (2018)

    Gorostiza Langa, Pau (IBEC)
    Rovira Virgili, Carme (UB)

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    Long distance currents between proteins in water  

    Despite the importance of electron transfer between proteins in photosynthesis and cellular combustion, the electric current between partner proteins has never been measured as a function of their separation in water. Here, we use electrochemical tunneling spectroscopy to show that the current between two protein partners decays along more than 10 nm in the solution, ten times farther than expected. Computer simulations reveal that water is "desalted" between the proteins, which causes an extended electric field. Proteins could use this long distance current mechanism in order to interact specifically but not strongly, thus keeping high turnover rates in the crowded environment of cells.

  • Cell signaling and cancer: news from the fly (2018)

    Jiménez Cañero, Gerardo (CSIC - IBMB)

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    Cell signaling and cancer: news from the fly

    Animal cells communicate through chemical signals that are essential for normal development and survival. When one such signal reaches a cell, it must be properly decoded to produce the correct response. Consequently, alterations in these signaling events can lead to multiple diseases, including cancer.

    We are studying a protein that functions as a nuclear sensor for the interpretation of the Ras-MAPK pathway, the most frequently mutated signaling pathway in human cancer. We identified this protein in the fruit fly Drosophila and dubbed it Capicua –the Catalan for ‘head and tail’– because embryos that lack Capicua function develop only a head and a tail without the normal middle body regions. The role of Capicua in Ras-MAPK signaling has been conserved throughout evolution and, accordingly, Capicua acts as a tumor suppressor in humans.

    In this work, we have discovered a new role of Capicua in connection with another signaling pathway, the evolutionarily conserved Toll/Interleukin 1 cascade. In this context, Capicua regulates the distinction between dorsal and ventral regions of the Drosophila embryo. It does so by binding to and repressing specific target genes only when Toll/Interleukin 1 signaling becomes active in ventral regions (see the accompanying figure). These results reveal a new paradigm of cell signaling and gene regulation, while at the same time raising the possibility that Ras-MAPK-independent mechanisms may also underlie Capicua function in humans.

  • Top footprints in the Higgs field (2018)

    Juste, Aurelio (IFAE)

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    Top footprints in the Higgs field

    Since 2009, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN collides protons at center-of-mass energies of up to 13 TeV, the highest energy ever reached by a particle accelerator.  One of the main goals of the LHC has been the search for the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of the Standard Model (SM), our most successful theory of elementary particles. The Higgs boson is the particle associated with a quantum field postulated to permeate the Universe, and responsible for endowing elementary particles with their mass. On July 4th, 2012, under lots of excitement and extensive media coverage, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC reported the observation of a new boson with properties compatible with those of the SM Higgs boson, marking the beginning of a new era in particle physics.

    The ATLAS Collaboration has recently reported the observation of the production of the Higgs boson together with a pair of top quarks, known as “ttH” production [1]. Only about 1% of all Higgs bosons are produced through this rare process, and scientists have searched for them exploiting most of the Higgs boson decay modes: to two W or Z bosons, to a pair of tau leptons, to a pair of b-quarks, and to a pair of photons. The combination of these searches has reached a significance of 6.3 standard deviations, providing a first direct measurement of strength of the interaction between the top quark and the Higgs boson, known as the “top quark Yukawa coupling”. As the top quark is the heaviest particle in the SM, this measurement is one of the most sensitive tests of the Higgs mechanism.

    Since 2011, IFAE scientists, under Prof. A. Juste’s leadership, are playing a major role in the search for ttH production with the Higgs boson decaying into a pair of b-quarks [2]. Recently, the IFAE team joined the analysis targeting Higgs boson decays into a pair of W/Z bosons or a pair of tau leptons [3], which holds great potential for a more precise measurement of the top quark Yukawa coupling using the ever-increasing data samples cumulated by the ATLAS experiment. Such measurement could shed new light on the nature of the Higgs boson and possibly reveal traces of new and unknown particle species.

  • Travels with music in court ritual and urban ceremonial (2018)

    Knighton, Tess (CSIC - IMF)

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    Travels with music in court ritual and urban ceremonial

    2018 saw the publication of the volume of essays 'Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe' in the prestigious Épitome Musical series for Brépols. This book, including 21 essays by leading international specialists in the field of urban history and musicicology, resulted from the ICREA International Workshop I organized in September 2015 in the Institut d'Estudis Catalans in Barcelona with the title 'Hearing the City: Musical Experience as Portal to Urban Soundscapes'. The essays were edited by myself and my former research assistant Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita on the Marie Curie research project 'Urban Musics and Musical Practices' (CIG-2012) and we both contributed essays based on recent research undertaken for that project in Barcelona archives. These highly original and often ground-breaking essays range from studies of fifteenth-century Vienna to late-eighteenth-century Naples, and other European and Iberian cities such as London, Hamburg, Zurich, Palermo, Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, Pamplona, Úbeda, Valencia and Barcelona as well as global cities such as Manila. The volume opens with a brilliant summary of the state-of-the-art in the field of urban musicology by Tim Carter and concludes with an analysis of the digital platform 'Historical Soundscapes' created by Juan Ruiz Jiménez.

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