With the rising awareness of the adverse effects of chemical pesticides, people are looking for organically grown vegetables. Consumers are increasingly choosing organic foods due to the perception that they are healthier than those conventionally grown. Vegetable crops are vulnerable to a range of pathogenic organisms that reduce yield by killing the plant or damaging the product, thus making ...

The discovery of novel chemical reactions or reaction sequences that are able to generate useful chemical products may be regarded as the heart of organic chemistry. We present here concepts and methods on how to find and explore new multi component reactions, especially with automated combinatorial methods. This "combinatorial reaction finding" provides also a powerful tool to the understandin...

The Amazing and Versatile Carbon – Chemical basis for life With an atomic number of 6, Carbon is the 4th most abundant element in the Universe by mass after (Hydrogen Helium and Oxygen). It forms more compounds that any other element, with almost 10 million pure organic compounds. Abundance, together with the unique diversity of organic compounds and their unusual polymer forming ability at the...

Cleaning of organic-fouled reverse osmosis membranes with concentrated salt solutions has been investigated. Polysaccharides (alginate and pectin) and Suwannee River natural organic matter were used as model organic foulants. By systematically varying the chemical and physical factors affecting salt cleaning efficiency, we were able to elucidate the processes and mechanisms involved during salt...

Organic nitrate esters, such as glyceryl trinitrate and isosorbide dinitrate, are a class of compounds used to treat a variety of vascular ailments. Their effectiveness relies on their ability to be bioactivated to nitric oxide (NO) which, in turn, relaxes vascular smooth muscle. Although there have been many biological studies that indicate that NO can be formed from organic nitrate esters in ...

Microbial fuel cells (MFC) are a promising technology for sustainable production of alternative energy and waste treatment. A microbial fuel cell transformation chemical energy in the chemical bonds in organic compounds to electrical energy through catalytic reactions of microorganisms under anaerobic conditions. It has been known for many years that it is possible to generate electricity direc...

Organic chemical structures are represented by binary vectors that contain information about presence or absence of 1365 substructures. The guiding ideas for selecting this set of substructures are described and examples are given. Software SubMat has been developed for a fast and flexible computation of binary substructure descriptors from molecular structures. Examples from structure similari...

We have tested acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) inhibitory activities of nineteen essential oils obtained from cultivated plants, namely one from Anethum graveolens L. (organic fertilizer), two from Foeniculum vulgare Mill. collected at fully-mature and flowering stages (organic fertilizer), two from Melissa officinalis L. (cultivated using organic and chemical ferti...

For nearly a century organic chemists have developed a method of sketching chemical reaction mechanisms in order to reason-out the structural transformations that convert one set of molecules into another. Known informally as pushing electrons (or curly arrows), it is a form of chemical illustration in which a sequence of structures is drawn to represent the movement of electrons and nuclei fro...

The chemical industry has recently begun to look at enzymes as novel catalysts for many organic syntheses. Nitrile-hydrolyzing enzymes such as nitrile hydratase and nitrilase have great potential as catalysts in processing organic chemical because they can convert nitriles to the corresponding higher-value amides or acids. Recently, the use of bacterial nitrile hydratase for industrial producti...