When such bacteria are blended into a cleaning product, the spores are able to survive rough handling, long storage, formulation with surfactants and preservatives, and other conditions that would kill them in their active form. “Once the right signals are in place—and usually those signals are nutrients, some water, and a good temperature—they will transition from that spore form into the vegetative form, which is where they’re active and where they can secrete enzymes,” Harp says.
by Craig Bettenhausen | January 29, 2023
We found that if you try to fossilize them in silica, they will be preserved better than bacteria are because the biomorphs are filled with sulfur, which is a hard mineral (Geology 2021, DOI: 10.1130/G48152.1). So morphological preservation is one thing; the second thing is chemical preservation. During fossilization, sulfur is incorporated in the organic molecules.
by Carolyn Wilke, special to C&EN | January 22, 2023
Last, we must reduce food waste using innovative and safe food packaging and preservation technologies while converting unavoidable food waste to valuable products. A key theme in the summit discussions was that innovation to address these complex challenges requires chemists and chemical engineers from every discipline to consider how their expertise can be applied to agriculture and be willing to engage across academia-industry-government boundaries.
by Adelina Voutchkova-Kostal and Jitesh Soares, ACS staff | January 21, 2023
Vincent-Ruz recently began to archive tweets with chemistry-related hashtags to preserve a record in case the site goes down. In addition to site function, users have raised concerns about Twitter’s future culture as high-profile impersonations and harassment have increased. Amid those concerns, questions about how to preserve the community that Twitter hosts have become more urgent.
by Laurel Oldach | November 22, 2022
Chinova is getting a preservative from mushrooms Nearly a third of the food grown on farms is wasted, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Chinova Bioworks is developing a natural preservative made from the antimicrobial polymer chitosan to address that problem. Chitosan, which also has pharmaceutical and industrial uses, is often sourced from the shells of crustaceans, but Chinova extracts the material from discarded mushroom stems.
by Matt Blois | November 04, 2022
For example, Caelux is working on improving the performance of solar cells by coating the glass with perovskite, Chinova Bioworks is developing preservatives from chitosan from discarded mushroom stems, and Cinthesis is working to scale up mechanochemical technologies. That is it for C&EN’s 10 Start-Ups to Watch for 2022.
by Bibiana Campos Seijo | November 04, 2022