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16 news posts in Frontiers in Chemistry

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Featured news

31 Aug 2023

Scientists develop finger sweat test to detect antipsychotic drugs in patients

by Angharad Brewer Gillham, Frontiers science writer Image/Shutterstock.com Maintaining a regimen of antipsychotic drugs can be difficult, but going off them unexpectedly can have disastrous health consequences for patients. Traditionally, monitoring patients on these drugs involves blood tests, which can be painful and time-consuming. A quick, non-invasive finger sweat test newly developed by scientists could replace these blood tests and make patients’ lives easier. Antipsychotic drugs treat incredibly vulnerable patients. Maintaining a treatment regimen is difficult for many patients, but not taking the medication is associated with a higher risk of poor health outcomes. These drugs are also very powerful with strong side-effects, and blood tests are often used to calibrate a patient’s dosage and confirm that they are taking the recommended dose. However, blood tests are invasive and potentially uncomfortable. Scientists have now discovered a way to test the levels of common antipsychotic drugs in the sweat from patients’ fingerprints, offering a quicker, more comfortable, and more convenient alternative to blood draws for patient monitoring. “Our test offers patients a quick and dignified way of showing commitment to antipsychotic treatment,” said Katherine Longman of the University of Surrey, first author of the study in Frontiers in Chemistry. “This non-invasive […]

Featured news

10 Aug 2021

Tens of thousands of unique molecules detected in 467 beers from around the world

By Mischa Dijkstra, Frontiers science writer Image: Hana Mara/Pexels.com Scientists from Germany have used state-of-the-art complementary mass spectrometry methods to quantify the chemical complexity in beer from around the world. In 467 commercial beer types they found at least 7,700 different chemical formulas, which translates to tens of thousands of unique molecules. Beers brewed from barley plus either wheat, rice, or corn contain molecules that reliably indicate the original cereal. The analysis takes only 10 minutes to detect thousands of metabolites per beer, making it a powerful new method for quality control. The tradition of beer brewing dates back to at least 7,000 BCE and maybe even to the invention of agriculture, considering that the starch in many cereals can spontaneously ferment to some extent if exposed to airborne yeasts. The code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi (rule 1792 to 1750 BCE), whose laws 108 through 111 regulate beer sales, shows that people have been anxious to safeguard the quality of beer through legislation for millennia. For example, the Bavarian ‘Reinheitsgebot’ (‘Purity Law’) of 1516, often considered the world’s oldest still functional – with modifications – food regulation, allows only barley, water, and hops as ingredients for brewing beer (with […]

Engineering

24 Feb 2021

Buckyballs on DNA for harvesting light

Supramolecular structure boosts efficiency of light harvesting for solar cells By Mischa Dijkstra, Frontiers science writer Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology show that DNA can serve as a scaffold for light-harvesting supramolecules, where fluorescent dyes work as electron donors and buckyballs as electron acceptors. The DNA’s regular 3D structure increases the light-to-electrons conversion efficiency by reducing so-called self-quenching. Such DNA-based supramolecules could be used in future organic solar cells. Image: Yes058 Montree Nanta/Shutterstock Organic molecules that capture photons and convert these into electricity have important applications for producing green energy. Light-harvesting complexes need two semiconductors, an electron donor and an acceptor. How well they work is measured by their quantum efficiency, the rate by which photons are converted into electron-hole pairs. Quantum efficiency is lower than optimal if there is “self-quenching”, where one molecule excited by an incoming photon donates some of its energy to an identical non-excited molecule, yielding two molecules at an intermediate energy state too low to produce an electron-hole pair. But if electron donors and acceptors are better spaced out, self-quenching is limited, so that quantum efficiency improves. In a new paper in Frontiers in Chemistry, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) […]

Life sciences

05 Feb 2021

Chief Editor of Organic Chemistry is elected to the European Academy of Sciences

Professor Iwao Ojima We are proud to announce that Professor Iwao Ojima, Chief Editor of the Organic Chemistry section of  Frontiers in Chemistry has been recently elected to the European Academy of Sciences (EurASc) as a Fellow. Iwao Ojima is professor at the Department of Chemistry, College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the director of the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo. Throughout his research career, Dr. Ojima has had numerous ties to the European scientific community – he was first recognized by European chemistry communities in organometallic chemistry, catalysis and fluorine chemistry, prior to joining the faculty at Stony Brook. His inventions on natural product-based anticancer agents were licensed to both French and Italian pharmaceutical companies. In addition, he served on the External Advisory Board of a highly innovative and successful multidisciplinary Center of Excellence, “Cell in Motion,” at the University of Münster and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany. He received numerous awards and honors, including 4 National Awards from the American Chemical Society in 4 different fields of chemistry, which is a very rare achievement. The European Academy of Sciences (EURASC) – the pan-European […]