A federal class action filed by Hagens Berman on behalf of three consumers in California, New York and Washington accuses Starbucks of falsely marketing certain protein lattes and matcha drinks as 'sugar-free' when they contain 13 to 21 grams of sugar per serving. Starbucks says the sugar comes naturally from its protein-boosted milk, that no sugar is added, and that it uses sugar-free syrup, with nutrition info posted online. The lawsuit seeks damages for affected buyers and a court order barring the 'sugar-free' label on products containing sugar.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-10-09
Researchers used cryo-electron microscopy to resolve the structure of a supercomplex formed between nitrogenase and a PII signal transduction protein in a methanogen archaeon. The structure captures how PII, a widely conserved regulator of nitrogen metabolism, physically associates with the nitrogen-fixing enzyme, offering a molecular view of this interaction not previously visualized at this resolution.
nature.com
· 2026-10-07
A federal lawsuit filed in Seattle accuses Starbucks of falsely marketing eight protein beverages as sugar-free, despite containing significant sugar amounts. The complaint highlights discrepancies between the labeling and the actual sugar content, which ranges from 16 to 21 grams per serving. Starbucks maintains that the sugar originates from the milk used and that no sugar is added intentionally.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-06
Researchers are increasingly using cell-free protein synthesis platforms to produce proteins without relying on living cells. This approach involves extracting cellular machinery and using it as a molecular factory, allowing for faster and more flexible protein production. The technology has roots in early genetic research and continues to evolve with various systems available, including bacterial, eukaryotic, and purified component-based methods.
nature.com
· 2026-10-06
Google's DeepMind published research describing a method to embed watermarks directly into AI-designed protein sequences without disrupting their biological function. The system, adapted from Google's SynthID technology used for digital media, aims to let trusted researchers' AI-generated proteins be verified while flagging unidentified sequences for further scrutiny.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-30
Google DeepMind researchers in London have built a watermarking system, described in Nature, that embeds a hidden statistical signal into both the amino-acid sequence and 3D structure of AI-designed proteins. The tag, called SynthIDBio, is meant to mark proteins as machine-generated without impairing their biological function, allowing them to be identified later in databases.
nature.com
· 2026-09-30
Researchers have extended Google's SynthID-text watermarking system to ProteinMPNN, a widely used protein sequence design model, creating a method called SynthIDBio-sequence. The approach embeds a detectable signal during the autoregressive sampling of amino acids, using a random seed, scoring function and tournament sampling algorithm similar to the text version. Because protein design typically uses low-temperature sampling that limits randomness, the team also developed a distortionary variant with an added filter to preserve detectability.
nature.com
· 2026-09-30
Researchers extracted insoluble tau aggregates from postmortem brains of five Alzheimer's disease patients and six corticobasal degeneration patients, then injected these seeds into the striatum of wild-type mice. Nine to twelve months later, the mice's brains were analyzed using immunohistochemistry and cryo-electron microscopy to assess how the human tau propagated.
nature.com
· 2026-09-30
Researchers led by Lövestam and colleagues injected fibrils of human tau protein into mice and found that the mice's own tau proteins adopted the same misfolded structure as the injected material. The finding, published in Nature, provides direct structural evidence that tau can act as a template converting normal protein into a toxic form, similar to how infectious prion proteins behave.
nature.com
· 2026-09-30
EMBL-EBI's AlphaFold Protein Structure Database has been expanded with more than 8,000 predicted structures of interacting protein pairs from viruses spanning 23 families that infect humans, including monkeypox virus. The addition, part of a new 'pandemic preparedness portal', builds on an earlier 2024 update that added 1.7 million interacting protein pairs from 20 organisms such as humans and tuberculosis bacteria.
nature.com
· 2026-09-24
Researchers studying dietary restriction in fruit flies report identifying a specific protein that appears to mediate the link between reduced food intake and extended lifespan. The finding, described in a new study, points to a molecular mechanism that may help explain how caloric restriction slows aging in this model organism.
nature.com
· 2026-09-23
Biochemist Anna Pertl at the Whitehead Institute prompted an AI system called Co-Scientist to generate novel strategies for disrupting molecular condensates that fuel the cancer-driving protein MYC. Unlike a simple chatbot, the tool deploys multiple autonomous agents that search literature, debate competing explanations, and iteratively refine hypotheses before returning results, a process that can take hours. The work builds on prior findings by her supervisor Richard Young, whose lab showed cancer cells hijack condensates at super-enhancers to overproduce MYC, research now being pursued commercially through his company Dewpoint Therapeutics.
nature.com
· 2026-09-21
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