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Hi, I’m Lisa Jarvis, Senior Correspondent for C&EN. I cover the pharmaceutical industry, and routinely write about young biotech companies that have spun out of academic labs. For C&EN’s Ten Start-ups to Watch, I helped generate a long list of start-ups worth considering and, along with Melody and our editor Mike McCoy, pared those down to the 10 “winners.” Now taking suggestions for start-ups with chemistry at their core to consider for next year’s feature. Hi, I’m Melody Bomgardner, Senior Business Editor for C&EN. I primarily cover the so-called cleantech sectors–along with agriculture and food topics–for the magazine. Start-ups are rather common in the cleantech industries and, increasingly, in agriculture. I love talking to entrepreneurs about how they go from discoveries in the lab to creating a sustainable business. The result of our searching and winnowing appeared in the Nov. 2 issue. C&EN profiled 10 start-ups working across a wide range of fields—from agriculture to biotechnology to materials science and beyond. The list includes Padlock Therapeutics, Carbon3D, Liquid Light, and Nohms Technologies. Whether they’re trying to treat a debilitating disease or extend the life of your cell phone battery, these companies are united by a common theme: They all are using groundbreaking chemistry to solve real-world problems. Some have substantial backing from venture firms or corporate partners; others are still working to validate their technology. We arrived at this diverse collection by polling knowledgeable staffers, scouring databases of start-ups, and asking tuned-in sources for recommendations. We’ll be back at 1:00 pm EST(10 am PT, 6 pm UTC) to start answering questions. EDIT: It’s 1pm EST, and we’re live. Melody and I will be here for an hour to answer your question. EDIT: Thanks, all! It’s 2pm EST and Melody and I are signing off. If you haven’t, check out the profiles of the ten companies we think are worth keeping an eye on: http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i43/10-Start-Ups-Watch.html

Hello, I am Manolis Dermitzakis (everyone calls me Manolis), Professor of Genetics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. I will be connecting with you from (surprisingly) sunny Geneva (though it will be dark when I connect) and I am looking forward to reading your questions and try to open a debate about what is important and how we can improve our knowledge of human biology by means of genetic analysis. We have a strong interest in population genomics and genetics of complex traits. We are using various methodologies to understand the role of genetic variation in phenotypic variation. We also aim to understand what fraction of genetic variation is harbored within known functional elements of the human genome, and develop methodologies for their efficient identification. Our main focus is on genome-wide analysis of gene expression and cellular phenotypes and association with nucleotide variation with a focus on disease susceptibility. The questions in our lab range from basic biology of the genome to how we can use molecular phenotypes to understand individual disease risk. However, I am open to all questions outside my comfort zone and I promise I will let you know when I don’t know, which may be more frequent than you think ☺ I am looking forward to chatting with you! Manolis’s current research focuses on the genetic basis of cellular phenotypes and complex traits. He has served as an analysis co-chair in the pilot phase of the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of Dna Elements) consortium and member of the analysis group of the Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium and the International HapMap project. He had a leading analysis role in the extension of the HapMap (aka HapMap3 project) and is a member of the analysis group of the 1000 genomes project and a co-chair in the GTEx (Genotype-tissue expression) project. I will be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything!

Greetings from sunny Greece, where I am taking a few hours to chat with you about human genetics on reddit. My name is Nicholas Katsanis, but please call me Nico. I am a human geneticist, and the Director of the Center for Human Disease Modeling at Duke University. My passion has always been to understand human genetic disorders all the way from the discovery of genes that cause them to dissecting pathomechanism and thinking about the possibility of developing new therapies. Over the years, my team and I have worked to identify genes that cause a range of disorders, with an emphasis on rare pediatric traits. As part of that journey, we have begun to appreciate how the context of the genome can alter the impact of deleterious mutations and impact clinical outcomes profoundly. In that context, we have also realized how the complexity of the genome poses a real challenge in understanding pathomechanism as well as predicting outcomes for patients; we are working hard to develop new biological tools that can help us interpret the functional consequence of genetic variation. In parallel, we are working to build a path towards integrating the research and the clinical enterprise as a way to improve the impact of genetics in health care. Today, I am happy to field any and all questions about human genetics, from why Mendel’s peas are truly wrinkly to what the major stumbling blocks are to really accelerating the development of therapeutics. I’ll be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything!

Hi Reddit, My background is in sociology, but I have always wanted to understand how other disciplines view the world and shape our thinking. My first book, The Limits of Neoliberalism, traced how the ideas of Chicago School economists transformed how markets are regulated by law, and how ideas of Harvard Business School strategists transformed how we understand political leadership. My recent book, The Happiness Industry, outlines a critical history of attempts to measure and optimise our subjective feelings (emotions), from Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century through to the latest practices in ‘neuro-marketing’ and twitter ‘sentiment analysis’. I’ve written for various publications, including The Atlantic, Salon.com, The Financial Times and The New York Times. Before becoming an academic, I worked in policy think tanks, where I first became interested in how experts are influenced by the social sciences. I am currently director of the Political Economy Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London. This AMA has now ended. Thanks very much for all of your excellent questions, and your interest in my work. Stay happy(ish)!

I am Alberto Montanari, Professor of Water Resources Management at the University of Bologna - Italy, and Editor-in-Chief of Water Resources Research (WRR), an interdisciplinary journal published by AGU focusing on hydrology and water resources celebrating its 50th this year! WRR is addressing challenging questions for humanity: How is water best managed? How can we secure water all over the world? Is there enough water to feed an ever increasing population? What about the potential impacts of climate change on water resources? How will extreme floods and drought change in the future? Water scientists are addressing these issues in many ways, including using satellites to estimate global water availability and understand how water can be best distributed, and studying the so-called “virtual water trade”, or the virtual displacement of water obtained by exporting food. A Special Collection of WRR looks back on 50 years of research activity in this area and provides a perspective for future research focusing on water systems for the development and benefit of society. Visit the site of WRR here: http://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/agu/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1944-7973/ I hope to answer lots of interesting questions about water science and management. I will be back to answer your questions at 12 pm ET (9 am PT, 5 pm UTC), ask me anything!

Hi Reddit, My name is Albert Ko and I am a Professor at Yale School of Public Health. My research focuses on identifying solutions for health problems that have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization, social inequity and the growth of slum settlements. I am joined by my colleague, Federico Costa, who is an Associate Professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. His research centers on how the ecology of the slum communities influences the disease emergence and transmission in such environments. Federico and I recently published a study, titled “Global Mortality and Morbidity of Leptospirosis: A Systematic Review”, in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. This study estimated the health burden caused by leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that is transmitted by rats, livestock and other animals in environments that lack basic sanitation. We found that leptospirosis accounts for one million cases and 60,000 deaths each year, most of which occur in regions where its impact on subsistence farmers, pastoralists and slum dwellers has been “neglected”. Furthermore, the burden of leptospirosis is projected to rise as the global expansion of shantytowns and climate change-associated extreme weather events create the environmental conditions for intensified transmission. We invite you to ask questions about leptospirosis, and how changes in the world’s demographics and environment are creating new health challenges and neglected diseases which impart their greatest impact on vulnerable populations. We’ll be taking your questions at 1pm ET (10 am PT, 6 pm UTC) – Ask Us Anything! NOTE from PLOS: Albert and Federico are presenting at a conference in Brazil today, and will answer questions as they are able, sometimes before or after the 1-2pm ET live chat hour.

Hi Reddit, I have more than 40 years of experience in patent an intellectual property litigation, including several landmark cases of pioneering biotechnology breakthroughs, revolutionary medical devices, and blockbuster pharmaceuticals. But before becoming a leading biotech and pharmaceutical patent attorney, I was a professional chemist. I went on to be a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and went on to serve as a scientific adviser on intellectual property issues at Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany, during the formation of the European Patent Convention. I have represented start-up biotech firms and major U.S. and European chemical and pharmaceutical companies. Feel free to ask me anything about the intersection of science and the law, biotech/pharmaceutical patents, or scientific intellectual property. Later today, I’ll be hosting an ACS “Program in a box” Webinar on establishing and protecting your intellectual property. Feel free to ask questions about that, or tune in later here: http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/acs-webinars/program-in-a-box/pib-on-demand/protect-ip.html I’ll be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything! EDIT: Hi folks, this is ACS’s Reddit team speaking. Robert Koch’s flight was delayed, but he just landed and is making his way to a reliable internet connection as we speak. He’ll be online at 2 PM ET now to answer all of your questions. Sorry for the delay – keep sending those questions. Thanks! Greetings and sorry for the delay due to flight problems. I will run until 3 pm eastern and hopefully be able to supplement tomorrow. Have to run now but I’ll check back tomorrow.

Hello, I am Glenn Daehn, a professor of materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University. I find great joy and concern in manufacturing process innovation. On the joy side, my group is working in the unusual area of impulse manufacturing. This is using short-duration, high-amplitude pressure pulses that we use to make things. Usually we shape, cut or weld materials using very high pressures or speeds. Capacitor bank discharge is typically where the energy is stored, and this is then it is turned to mechanical work in one of a number of ways such as by a Lorentz magnetic repulsion from a coil, or by developing a very large pressure pulse by vaporizing a shaped thin metal foil. Examples of what we do are available at my group’s website at http://iml.osu.edu. Recently, we have had great interest in using this as a method for the solid-state welding of metals. To allow us to get into a deep and geeky conversation on this, I’ve prepared a fairly rapid-pace 35 minute lecture on this that you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H3M8yLKNjY&spfreload=10 We are very interested in developing these impulse manufacturing techniques as go-to methods for manufacturing. Two things lack. First is a good design-science foundation for this work. We (and other researchers – see: http://i2fg.org) are developing that now, and we have invested in some great instrumentation. Second, we need to disseminate these ideas and get some early adopters into this space. I am grateful to reddit for helping sine some light on this technical area. At the risk of diluting the technical conversation, we may also discuss the overall climate for process innovation in America. The US does a breathtakingly good job of top-rate academic research. But in my opinion, we only do a marginal job of process innovation when it comes to new physical systems in areas like metal processing and manufacturing, which are vital to our economy, sustainability and security. I’d be happy to discuss if the US is making the right investments and training people with the right skills to innovate in capital-intensive industries. I think the maker movement and projects like the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation institutes represent great steps in the right direction, but wonder if they are sufficient when we look around our competitive world. Proof: http://imgur.com/w1h8D5f I will be back at 1 pm ET (10 PT, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything! Hey – gotta take off for now. Will try to check back later. Thanks all for the awesome questions and response and thought provoking questions. Its clear a lot of people would like to try these methods themselves! I’ll see what we can do there. I’ll try to do one more pass at the board tomorrow (Tue).

Hello redditors of /r/science. I am Niklas Ivarsson, PhD student at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Yesterday you showed a great interest in our work regarding why high intensity interval training works. In the article we found that free radicals produced during high intensity interval training (HIIT) react in particularly with the ryanodine receptor, a critical calcium channel in excitation-contraction coupling. The reaction causes the channel to leak calcium from the specialized subcellular compartment (sarcoplasmic reticulum), into the cytoplasm. This causes a prolonged period of increased basal levels of calcium in the muscle cell. Increased baseline calcium acts as a signal for transcription factors important for mitochondrial improvements (e.g. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma, coactivator 1 alpha (PGC-1α). HIIT, which is extremely intensive, causes a greater production of free radical than ‘regular exercise’. This results in the ‘damage’ to the ryanodine receptor, and subsequent ‘leak’ is more severe, and last longer than after a marathon. The ryanodine receptor modification and leak can be prevented if the exercise is done with strong antioxidants. Explaining why antioxidants prevents the positive effects of exercise (Ristow M. et al 2009) A little bit about me: I have a background in biomedicine. For my master thesis I decided to leave the world of cell culture and try my best in, what to me was a great unknown, physiology. For the master project I focused on insulin signaling in skeletal muscle. From there I kind of just stuck around in the research group of Professor Håkan Westerblad. During my master I got kind of bored. As per usual with large lab groups, there are often several “unfinished” projects laying around waiting for someone to come along. One of those side project eventually led us to applying for research money, namely ‘How does a muscle cell know it need to improve after endurance exercise’. We already knew calcium had to be involved somehow. Now 4.5 years later I am about to present my PhD thesis, which includes 6 (4 published, 2 waiting) different manuscripts around the subject of calcium’s role in training adaptation. Tl;dr I am a biomedical lab rat who stumbled onto the discovery that free radicals produced during exercise stress the muscle cell, which teaches the it to improve for the next shower of free radicals, resulting in improved endurance. I will be back later today to answer your questions, Ask me anything! edit: I will start answering your questions around 4pm USA East Coast Time edit: ok, you guys seem really interested so I’ll try and squeeze in some answers early edit: Thank you everyone for your questions. It is very late over here and time for me to go. Hope my answers satisfied your curiosity. //Niklas