Current Analytical Chemistry - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2020

Background: Highly sensitive and rapid analysis of food contaminants is of great significance for food safety control. Aptamer is a new kind of recognition molecules which could be applied for constructing homogeneous analysis assays, potentially achieving highly sensitive, cheap and rapid profiling of food contaminants. Methods: An overview of the literature concerning the homogeneous analysis of food contaminations based on aptamers has been reviewed (focused on the most recent literature, 2000-2018). Results: Attributed to aptamer’s controllability, designability and feasibility for the adoption of nucleic acid amplification, rapid, highly sensitive homogeneous assay for various food contaminants could be constructed. The structure-switching aptamer probe would confer quick, efficient and specific response to target food contaminants. Besides, the capability of amplification of aptamer sequences or nucleic acid probes would lead to highly sensitive detection. Conclusion: Aptamer-based homogeneous analysis methods have already been applied to detect various food contaminations ranging from toxins, heavy metal and pesticide to allergen and pathogenic bacteria. However, it is still a challenge to achieve robust and accurate detection of food contaminants in complex food samples.

Background: The huge quantity of wastewater, containing poisonous and hazardous dyes, is released by various industries which pollute water in direct and indirect ways. Most of the dyes are a dangerous class of water contaminants which have affected the environment drastically. Some dyes such as congo red, rhodamine B, methylene blue, methyl violet, and crystal violet are a serious threat to human beings. Remediation Method: Numerous methods are available for the removal of dyes from water. Adsorption, being a superior and eco-friendly technique, has advantage of eliminating organic dyes because of the availability of materials as adsorbents. The inexpensive nanomaterials are a more attractive choice for remediation of various dyes due to their unique properties and offer an adequate pathway to adsorb any organic dye from water to overcome its hazardous effects on human health. Results: In this review, we have discussed the latest literature related to various types of synthesis, characterization and uses as adsorbent for highly adsorptive removal capacity of nanoparticles for organic dyes. Conclusion: Adsorption technology provides an attractive pathway for further research and improvement in more efficient nanoparticles, with higher adsorption capacity, for numerous dyes to eliminate the dyes discharged from various industries and thus reduce the contamination of water. Therefore, nanocomposites may contribute to future prospective water treatment process.

Background: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) occurs when microbes become resistant to antibiotics causing complications and limited treatment options. AMR is more significant where antibiotics use is excessive or abusive and the strains of bacteria become resistant to antibiotic treatments. Current technologies for bacteria and its resistant strains identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) are mostly central-lab based in hospitals, which normally take days to weeks to get results. These tools and procedures are expensive, laborious and skills based. There is an ever-increasing demand for developing point-of-care (POC) diagnostics tools for rapid and near patient AMR testing. Microfluidics, an important and fundamental technique to develop POC devices, has been utilized to tackle AMR in healthcare. This review mainly focuses on the current development in the field of microfluidics for rapid AMR testing. Method: Due to the limitations of conventional AMR techniques, microfluidic-based platforms have been developed for better understandings of bacterial resistance, smart AST and minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) testing tools and development of new drugs. This review aims to summarize the recent development of AST and MIC testing tools in different formats of microfluidics technology. Results: Various microfluidics devices have been developed to combat AMR. Miniaturization and integration of different tools has been attempted to produce handheld or standalone devices for rapid AMR testing using different formats of microfluidics technology such as active microfluidics, droplet microfluidics, paper microfluidics and capillary-driven microfluidics. Conclusion: Current conventional AMR detection technologies provide time-consuming, costly, labor-intensive and central lab-based solutions, limiting their applications. Microfluidics has been developed for decades and the technology has emerged as a powerful tool for POC diagnostics of antimicrobial resistance in healthcare providing, simple, robust, cost-effective and portable diagnostics. The success has been reported in research articles; however, the potential of microfluidics technology in tackling AMR has not been fully achieved in clinical settings.

Background: Biopharmaceuticals are biological drugs consisting of a complex compound that can be produced by a living organism or derive from it. Biopharmaceuticals are very complicated compounds from structural point of view and for this reason, they cannot be fully characterized in terms of their structure with current analytical methods as it happens instead of low molecular weight chemicals drugs. Introduction: The regulatory guidelines require the characterization of the primary or higher sequence of these molecules and the characterization of any post-translational modifications. The use of biopharmaceuticals has really grown in the last few years: in 2016, the number of biopharmaceuticals approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) for use in humans’ diseases was 1357. From 2013 to 2016, 73 of these compounds were approved for the treatment of cancer, inflammation, immune disorders, infections, anemia and cardiovascular diseases. Aim/Conclusion: The aim of the present review is to provide an overview of recent approaches for the characterization of biopharmaceutical products in HPLC that have been presented in the literature in the last years.

Background: Chiral separation involves many phenomena in which the elution order of the enantiomers has its unique position. The phenomenon of elution order of the enantiomers has also been used in the determination of optical purity which is favorable to elute the major component after minor enantiomeric impurity but the main problem is that, this phenomenon is rare. Results: This review rumors the reversal order of elution of many chiral molecules in HPLC. Besides, this review pronounces the effects of pH, derivatisation of drugs, the composition of the mobile phase, and temperature on the reversal order of elution of chiral drugs. The efforts are also made to discuss the possible future perspectives of reversal order of elution. Conclusion: Various parameters such as pH, mobile phase composition, temperature, and chemical structure of the analytes play a role in the phenomena of the reversal order of elution of many chiral molecules which are discussed in the article.

Background: The sperm plasma membrane meets the requirements of sperm transit through the female genital tract and subsequent fertilization. Commonly, the (phospho)lipid composition of sperm is characterized by tremendous amounts of highly unsaturated fatty acyl residues such as docosahexaenoic and docosapentaenoic acid. While human sperm contain almost exclusively diacyl lipids, many animal sperm additionally contain significant amounts of ether lipids such as alkylacyl- and alkenyl-acyl lipids (plasmalogens). Hypothesis/Objective: It is suggested that deviations from the typical lipid composition are indicative of pathological changes. Therefore, simple methods to elucidate the sperm lipid composition are essential. Method: Matrix-assisted laser desorption and ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry (MS) is a fast and simple method. Since the selection of the most suitable matrix is a crucial step in MALDI MS, this topic will be highlighted. It will also be shown that MALDI MS can be easily combined with thin-layer chromatography to overcome ion suppression effects. Results: The lipid composition of sperm from different species can be elucidated by MALDI MS. However, different matrix compounds have to be used to record positive and negative ion mass spectra. Since some sperm (glyco)lipids are characterized by the presence of sulfate residues which suppress the detection of less acidic lipids in the negative ion mode, previous separation is often necessary. It will be also emphasized that plasmalogens can be easily identified by either enzymatic digestion or treatment with acids. Conclusion: MALDI MS is a reliable method to obtain sperm lipid fingerprints in a simple and convenient way.