Chemistry Articles

Helping Plants Fertilize Themselves

Farmers buy 88 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer annually to grow staple crops such as corn, wheat and rice. And it takes 3 to 5 percent of the world’s natural gas to make all that fertilizer. That’s frustrating because three-fourths of the Earth’s atmosphere is nitrogen, but it’s in a form that most crops can’t use.

But a few plants, such as alfalfa, soybeans and peanuts, can fertilize themselves, in a way, thanks to a friendly bacterial infection. These legumes recruit bacteria that “inhale” naturally occurring nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into the useful form that plants use for food.

Antimony Addition to Fruit Juice?

General

by Carl Saxton

High levels of antimony found in fruit juices causes concern for health, say European scientists.

Antimony has no known biological function and the effects of long term human exposure are unknown. Antimony trioxide, a suspected carcinogen, is used as a catalyst in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) production which is used to package foodstuffs.

Peptides Potential for Malaria Medicines

Medicinal

by Michael Spencelayh

Researchers from the UK have designed a test that will help in the search for new anti-malaria medicines.

Malaria is caused by parasites of the genus Plasmodium and causes over one million deaths per year. Plasmodium has a complex life cycle involving the host and an insect carrier, but a critical step is the invasion of red blood cells.

Fishing for New Medications

Medicinal

A robust new technique for screening drugs' effects on zebrafish behavior is pointing Harvard scientists toward unexpected compounds and pathways that may govern sleep and wakefulness in humans.

Among their more intriguing findings, described this week in the journal Science: Various anti-inflammatory agents in the immune system, long known to induce sleep during infection, may also shape normal sleep/wake cycles. The new research identifies several compounds with surprising effects on sleep and wakefulness in zebrafish. But it also suggests that despite the evolutionary gap between them, zebrafish and mammals may be strikingly similar in the neurochemistry underlying their rest/wake cycles, meaning these same compounds may prove effective in people.

EPA Targets Chemical Confidentiality Loopholes

General

by Rebecca Renner

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking a tougher stance on confidentiality claims that allow firms to prevent the names of chemicals identified as potential health risks being made available to the public.

The change to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), announced on 21 January, is the latest in the Obama administration's effort to strengthen the law, but not the last - the EPA promises additional steps in the coming months.

Copper-Free Click Chemistry Used in Mice

Organic

For the first time, the widely used molecular synthesis technique known as click chemistry has been safely applied to a living organism. Researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have crafted a unique copper-free version of click chemistry to create biomolecular probes for in vivo studies of live mice. Conventional click chemistry reactions require a copper catalyst that is toxic to cells and organisms.