Four million Americans suffer from glaucoma, an incurable eye disease that slowly degrades peripheral vision and eventually leads to blindness. A new treatment could potentially stop this degradation and possibly save people’s vision before it’s too late.

Raquel Lieberman, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and her lab team have discovered two new antibodies with promise to treat glaucoma. The antibodies can break down the protein myocilin, which, when it malfunctions, can cause glaucoma.

Lieberman’s group recently published this research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Nexus.

Futurity

Georgia Tech’s campus was recently the site of an interactive celebration of science. The 2025 Atlanta Science Festival launched Saturday, March 8, 2025 at Georgia Tech. Dozens of exhibits were spread out all over the campus, with hands-on STEM activities, demonstrations, and information about the research currently happening on campus. 

(A similar story appeared at WABE.)

Atlanta News First

Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Jennifer Glass comments on a paper recently published in Science that details “photochemodenitrification,” a nitrous oxide production pathway through which sunlight induces substantial and consistent nitrous oxide formation under oxic abiotic conditions in fresh and marine surface waters. 

“I think it’s a beautiful [study],’ says Glass, noting that researchers have previously shown similar light-driven processes in atmospheric aerosols, but never in aquatic environments. “As we’ve been sequencing more and more genomes in the environment a lot of us have moved really into that -omics space, looking for key markers for genes … This just goes to show that sometimes it’s not biological,” she says. “You have to think outside the box and consider all the chemistry that can be happening, not just the enzymes.”

Chemistry World

Nga Lee "Sally" Ng, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, leads the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported Atmospheric Science and Chemistry mEasurement NeTwork (ASCENT), which includes 12 air quality measurement sites nationwide. Each site has state-of-the-art instruments that help us understand aerosols, or tiny particles in the atmosphere. The network is constantly analyzing the chemical constituents of aerosols with a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometers, referred to as PM2.5, which contribute to more than 90% of the adverse health impacts associated with air pollution.

"We provide ASCENT data to the public in real time so that people know what's in the air we're breathing," Ng said.

NSF News

In a study published in Chem, scientists from Scripps Research and the Georgia Institute of Technology question the validity of the “formose reaction” hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that simple formaldehyde molecules reacted under early Earth conditions to form ribose. But the new findings reveal a key limitation: under controlled experimental conditions, the formose reaction does not yield linear sugars like ribose. Instead, it predominantly produces branched sugar structures, which are incompatible with the formation of RNA.

“Our results cast doubt on the formose reaction as the basis for the formation of linear sugars,” says co-senior author Charles Liotta, Regents’ Professor Emeritus in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

SciTechDaily