The material is capable of capturing trace amounts of benzene, a toxic pollutant, from the air and crucially use less energy than existing materials to do so, according to the researchers.

The sponge-like porous material could revolutionise the search for clean air and have a significant impact in the battle against climate change, the researchers believe.

Professor Michael Zaworotko, Bernal Chair of Crystal Engineering and Science Foundation of Ireland Research Professor at University of Limerick’s Bernal Institute, and colleagues developed the new material, with findings reported in the prestigious Nature Materials journal.

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) including benzene are a class of toxic pollutants that cause severe environmental and health issues. Developing technologies to remove benzene from air at trace concentrations and doing it with a low energy footprint are both challenges that have not been overcome until now.

“A family of porous materials — like sponge — have been developed to capture benzene vapour from polluted air and produce a clean air stream for a long working time,” explained Professor Zaworotko.

“These materials could be regenerated easily under mild heating, making them candidates for air purification and environmental remediation.

“Our materials can do much better in both sensitivity and working time than traditional materials.”

Professor Zaworotko and Dr Xiang-Jing Kong from the Department of Chemical Sciences at UL, along with colleagues from leading universities in China, developed the new porous material which has such strong affinity for benzene that it captures the toxic chemical even when present at just 1 part in 100,000.

This material resembles Swiss cheese because it is full of holes and it is these holes that attract the benzene molecules, according to the researchers.

In terms of energy, because the capture process is based upon physical rather than chemical bonding, the energy footprint of capture and release is much lower than previous generations of materials.

“Breaking up gas mixtures is hard to do. This is especially true for the minor components that comprise air, which include carbon dioxide and water. The properties of our new material show that breaking up is no longer hard to do for benzene,” explained Professor Zaworotko.

Earlier work from Professor Zaworotko’s lab resulted in leading materials for carbon capture and water harvesting. The water harvesting material has such favourable properties for capturing and releasing water from the atmosphere that is already being used in dehumidification systems.

Dr Xiang-Jing Kong explained: “Based on smart design, our materials do well in addressing challenges of both technical and social relevance, such as trace benzene removal from air. This is hard for conventional materials, and thus highlights the charm of porous materials.”

Overall, these results suggest that a new generation of bespoke porous materials of the type invented at UL can enable a general approach to the capture of toxic chemicals from air.

“Aromatic isomers are difficult to separate in their mixtures with traditional methods, which are always energy-intensive,” Dr Xiang-Jing Kong explained.

“This research opened up possibilities to design porous materials for efficient separation of these chemicals with low energy input as well as removal of other trace pollutants from air.”

The study was funded by the European Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland.

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Materials provided by University of Limerick. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The researchers built upon on an existing method, improving its efficiency, accessibility and quality controls. Using the new animal-free protocol, they evaluated 92 chemicals and found that their results agreed with those of a common animal test method for 77% of the compounds. The results, published today in Toxics, increase confidence in the new method’s measurements, potentially paving a route to standardization, which could both increase international trade and reduce animal testing.

Many governing bodies, including the European Union and certain U.S. states, have recently banned the sale of animal-tested cosmetics. However, animal testing is still required in some parts of the world to assess the safety of cosmetics. With regulations varying by region, it has become challenging for certain products to gain approval across the board.

Some animal-free methods of screening for skin allergens do exist, but their widespread adoption has been stymied by several limitations. For example, the direct peptide reactivity assay (DPRA) requires costly equipment that can only test a handful of samples at a time. The DPRA can be slow as well. To attain statistically meaningful conclusions about a test compound, testers would need to repeat the assay’s multiday process multiple times.

The low sample size per test also reduces opportunity for control samples that would allow researchers to identify and minimize factors that may vary between samples and skew measurements.

To increase confidence in animal-free tests and promote their adoption, several federal agencies, coordinated by a standing committee of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, are assessing the reliability of new, promising methods. The CPSC, a member agency of the committee, has partnered with NIST to evaluate a method much faster than the DPRA, known as the electrophilic allergen screening assay (EASA).

The EASA can be used to determine how reactive a chemical would be with human skin proteins, that is, how likely it would be to cause an allergic response. No actual proteins, or the amino acids they are made from, are present in the test. Instead, the researchers use two probe molecules, 4-nitrobenzenethiol (NBT) and pyridoxylamine (PDA), which, when reacting with other chemicals, undergo changes that can be detected optically.

“The two molecules are like surrogates for the amino acids cysteine and lysine,” said Elijah Petersen, a NIST research scientist and lead author of the paper. “If a test compound binds to NBT and PDA, it is likely to also bind to the proteins in the skin, which is the first step of many adverse reactions.”

Although the initial version of EASA showed promise, the NIST and CPSC researchers found it shared weaknesses with the DPRA, Petersen said. The type of instruments needed to run the original EASA method typically only hold up to eight samples at a time and are not readily available to most biological labs.

Petersen and colleagues reconfigured EASA so that 96 samples could be analyzed in a single run using plastic well plates and instruments called plate readers — two ubiquitous items in biological labs.

With up to 96 wells to work with, the researchers redesigned the protocol so that many control wells could be tested alongside wells containing test compounds. The controls would allow researchers to find out whether factors such as the solvent used, air bubbles in samples or the optical properties of the test compounds interfered with their measurements.

“In this one assay, we have much of the information we need to understand the sources of variability,” Petersen said. “I think we really capture more and have more confidence compared to other methods.”

To validate their redesigned protocol, the researchers used the new EASA to analyze 92 test compounds. Most of the chemicals had been assessed in previously published studies on mice through a standard test called the local lymph node assay (LLNA).

They found that the LLNA and EASA results agreed 77% of the time on which chemicals were allergens and which ones were not. Individual EASA tests were completed within a day, while LLNA tests require at least five days, Petersen said.

The new EASA also performed similarly to the DPRA, while testing samples at a higher rate and with more accessible equipment.

This work provides a robust methodology for evaluating the safety of cosmetics without animals. With further validation, the EASA could become a viable candidate for standardization and eventual adoption by regulatory bodies, according to Petersen.

“This study could support testing of commercial products, because we’re going to have a really good method that’s cheaper, faster, better quality,” Petersen said. “I think it could also help raise the quality of in vitro test systems in general if people adopt our approach of adding extensive process controls.”

The condition is one of the most common and serious valve disease problems, caused by a narrowing of the aortic valve opening.

Once patients develop symptoms such as breathlessness, chest pains or blackouts then guidelines recommend replacing the narrowed valve. But many patients with aortic stenosis do not have symptoms even when they have severe narrowing of the valve and are thus not eligible for valve replacement.

New research published today shows that these patients would benefit by undergoing a valve replacement — before they suffer irreversible heart muscle damage.

Lead researcher Prof Vassilios Vassiliou, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said: “The heart has four valves, which allow the blood to flow in one direction efficiently. With increasing age, one of the valves, the aortic valve, becomes increasingly narrowed or ‘stenosed’.

“A lot of patients with severe aortic stenosis do not have symptoms and therefore are not eligible for valve replacement according to the current guidelines.

“For these patients without symptoms, the guidelines suggest a ‘watchful waiting’ approach and intervention is recommended only when they show symptoms or develop pump failure.

“We wanted to know if it would be better to perform surgery and replace the valve sooner rather than later.”

The research team carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis, comparing early intervention versus conservative management in patients with asymptomatic severe aortic stenosis.

They then analysed data from all the available studies which involved a total of 3798 patients, out of which 302 were included in the two largest randomised controlled trials and 3496 in the observational studies.

Prof Vassiliou said: “We found that early intervention, before patients have symptoms, is associated with lower risk of death and hospitalisation for heart failure.

“By the time the patients develop symptoms, there has likely been irreversible damage to the muscle of the heart. This in turn may preclude a worse prognosis and adverse outcomes even after successful intervention.

“The timing of aortic valve intervention is crucial.

“We hope that our findings may herald the beginning of a change in the management of aortic stenosis patients, enabling the intervention to take place more commonly whilst the patients are asymptomatic.

“Ongoing trials investigating this high-risk population are anticipated to shed more light into the matter and in the identification of the optimal time of intervention,” he added.

The research was carried out in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, West Suffolk Hospital, the Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals, Imperial College London, and the University of Leicester. It was partly funded by the Wellcome Trust.

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Materials provided by University of East Anglia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.