Thermal impact of underground car parks on urban groundwater.

Built-up areas are known to heavily impact the thermal regime of the shallow subsurface. In many cities, the answer to densification is to increase the height and depth of buildings, which leads to a steady growth in the number of underground car parks. These underground car parks are heated by waste heat from car engines and are typically several degrees warmer than the surrounding subsurface, which makes them a heat source for ambient subsurface and groundwater.

Gut-inhabiting Clostridia build human GPCR ligands by conjugating neurotransmitters with diet- and human-derived fatty acids.

Human physiology is regulated by endogenous signalling compounds, including fatty acid amides (FAAs), chemical mimics of which are made by bacteria. The molecules produced by human-associated microbes are difficult to identify because they may only be made in a local niche or they require a substrate sourced from the host, diet or other microbes. We identified a set of uncharacterized gene clusters in metagenomics data from the human gut microbiome.

Is thermal use of groundwater a pollution?

Thermal use of the shallow subsurface and its aquifers (< 400 m) is steadily increasing. Currently, more than 2800 aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) systems are operating worldwide alongside more than 1.2 million ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems in Europe alone.

Systematic Chemogenetic Library Assembly.

Chemogenetic libraries, collections of well-defined chemical probes, provide tremendous value to biomedical research but require substantial effort to ensure diversity as well as quality of the contents. We have assembled a chemogenetic library by data mining and crowdsourcing institutional expertise. We are sharing our approach, lessons learned, and disclosing our current collection of 4,185 compounds with their primary annotated gene targets (https://github.