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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Northwestern University researchers are casting a net for nanoparticles.
The team has discovered a new, rapid method for fabricating nanoparticles from a simple, self-assembling polymer. The novel method presents new possibilities for diverse applications, including water purification, diagnostics and rapidly generating vaccine formulations, which typically require many different types of molecules to be either captured or delivered at the same time.
Using a polymer net that collapses into nanoscale hydrogels (or nanogels), the method efficiently captures over 95% of proteins, DNA or small molecule drugs—alone or in combinations. By comparison, loading efficiency is typically between 5% and 20% for other nanoparticle delivery systems.
"We use a polymer that forms a wide net throughout an aqueous solution," said Northwestern's Evan A. Scott, who led the study. "Then we induce the net to collapse. It collects anything within the solution, trapping therapeutics inside of nanogel delivery vehicles with very high efficiency."
"It works like a fishing net, which first spreads out due to electrostatic repulsion and then shrinks upon hydration to trap 'fish,'" added Fanfan Du, a postdoctoral fellow in Scott's laboratory.
The paper was published last week (Sept. 29) in the journal Nature Communications.
[...] In addition to drug delivery applications, the researchers also believe the novel method could be used for water purification. The network could collapse to collect contaminants in water, leaving pure water behind.
Journal Reference:
Fanfan Du, Baofu Qiao, Trung Dac Nguyen, et al. Homopolymer self-assembly of poly(propylene sulfone) hydrogels via dynamic noncovalent sulfone–sulfone bonding [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18657-5)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 07 2020, @12:44PM
Then the police could deploy it to capture homeless junkies, cleaning up the streets.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday October 08 2020, @12:56PM
Sometimes when a story goes thru enough journalism and popular science filters it becomes a game to try and figure out what it really means.
I think they're talking about chelation compounds like EDTA. That seems a pretty cool poetic way to describe how they work.
Maybe 30 years ago in college I was doing EDTA titrations in quant chem analysis lab to determine water hardness or maybe it was heavy metal contamination, or both. I wonder if that's still state of the art.