Underwater asphalt volcanoes
Ten miles off the Californian coastline, at the bottom of the Santa Barbara channel, domes rise from the Pacific Ocean floor. A paper published on-line in the journal Nature Geoscience identified these as a series of unusual underwater volcanoes.
Ten miles off the Californian coastline, at the bottom of the Santa Barbara channel, domes rise from the Pacific Ocean floor. A paper published on-line in the journal Nature Geoscience1 identified these as a series of unusual underwater volcanoes.
“They’re larger than a football-field-long and as tall as a six-storey building,” says David Valentine, a geoscientist at UCSB and the paper’s lead author. “When you ‘fly’ Sentry [an autonomous underwater vehicle] over the sea floor, all the textures are visible of a once-flowing liquid that has solidified in place,” says Valentine. But the volcanoes did not form from lava flow as with typical volcanoes. The sub’s robotic arm broke off a sample of the brittle, black material and the team used mass spectrometry, carbon dating, microscopic fossils and comprehensive, two-dimensional gas chromatography, to determine that the structures are asphalt. They were formed when petroleum flowed from the sea-floor about 30 000–40 000 years ago.
“To me, as an oil-spill chemist, this was very exciting,” said Chris Reddy, a scientist at WHOI and a co-author of the paper. “I got to find out what oil looks like after 35 000 years.” According to Reddy, it looks “incredibly weathered. That means nature had taken away a lot of compounds. These mounds of black material were the last remnants of oil that exploded up from below. To see nature doing this on its own was an unbelievable find.”
1D.L. Valentine, Nature Geoscience, on-line 25 April 2010.
This story originally appeared in The Column. Click here to view that issue.
AI and GenAI Applications to Help Optimize Purification and Yield of Antibodies From Plasma
October 31st 2024Deriving antibodies from plasma products involves several steps, typically starting from the collection of plasma and ending with the purification of the desired antibodies. These are: plasma collection; plasma pooling; fractionation; antibody purification; concentration and formulation; quality control; and packaging and storage. This process results in a purified antibody product that can be used for therapeutic purposes, diagnostic tests, or research. Each step is critical to ensure the safety, efficacy, and quality of the final product. Applications of AI/GenAI in many of these steps can significantly help in the optimization of purification and yield of the desired antibodies. Some specific use-cases are: selecting and optimizing plasma units for optimized plasma pooling; GenAI solution for enterprise search on internal knowledge portal; analysing and optimizing production batch profitability, inventory, yields; monitoring production batch key performance indicators for outlier identification; monitoring production equipment to predict maintenance events; and reducing quality control laboratory testing turnaround time.
