India is among 23 nations where in a large population suffers from dental and skeletal flourosis due to high fluoride concentration in ground water. The prominent states, which are severely affected, are Andhrapradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Fluoride beyond desirable amounts (0.6 to 1.5 mg/l) in ground water is a major problem in many parts of the world. Taking the se...

A new approach for isolating and recovering biological macromolecules using membrane-encapsulated soluble ligand conjugates was investigated. Membrane-encapsulated solid adsorbents have been successfully developed and employed in our laboratory to isolate and purify proteins and enzymes directly from culture broths. This new concept also makes it possible to use soluble ligand conjugates instea...

One of the ways to regulate the cholesterol level in the blood is by adsorption of overproduced bile acids from the gastrointestinal tract. For this purpose, synthetic anion exchangers have been in clinical use for many years. The efficiency of these sorbents is rather low, because of their low binding capacity. In this work, cationic cellulose derivatives of different structure were evaluated ...

Introduction Adsorption is one of the most commonly used technologies to remove organic contaminants from aqueous solution in water treatment. The most conventional adsorbent is activated carbon (AC) – a substance which is extremely porous. However, in several recent studies, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been observed to be more efficient carbonaceous adsorbents than conventional ACs, with high...

The removal of a widespread used drug (i.e., ibuprofen) from water was investigated using high valuable carbon adsorbents obtained from chemical and physical activation of a bioresource (cork) and a municipal waste (plastic). The waste-derived carbons outperformed the adsorption capacity of commercial carbonaceous adsorbents due to their adequate features for the removal of the targeted compoun...

Our previous studies indicated that native carbonic anhydrase does not interact with hydrophobic adsorbents and that it acquires this ability upon denaturation. In the present study, an apo form of the enzyme was prepared by removal of zinc and a comparative study was performed on some characteristic features of the apo and native forms by far- and near-UV circular dichroism (CD), intrinsic flu...

Theoretical analysis and Computer simulations have proven to be cost-effective and powerful tools in scientific studies of materials, particularly at nano-scale where synthesis of nano-structures, interpretation of their observed character and exploration of new structures are not always straight forward. We present here fundamental principles of techniques used today for computational simulati...

The importance of removal of heavy metals from drinking water has received significant attention of researchers and decision makers across the globe. Bio-adsorbents have emerged as potential remediation materials for the removal of heavy metals and metalloids from both groundwater and surface water. Plants, algae, fungi are some of the biomass derived adsorbents which are capable of removing he...

Clean energy sources and global warming are among the major challenges of the 21st century. One of the possible actions toward finding alternative energy sources and reducing global warming are storage of H2 and CH4, and capture of CO2 by using highly efficient and low-cost adsorbents. Graphene and graphene-based materials attracted a great attention around the world because of their potential ...