A Review of In Situ Methods-Solid Phase Adsorption Toxin Tracking (SPATT) and Polar Organic Chemical Integrative Sampler (POCIS) for the Collection and Concentration of Marine Biotoxins and Pharmaceuticals in Environmental Waters.

Solid Phase Adsorption Toxin Tracking (SPATT) and Polar Organic Chemical Integrative Sampler (POCIS) are in situ methods that have been applied to pre-concentrate a range of marine toxins, pesticides and pharmaceutical compounds that occur at low levels in marine and environmental waters. Recent research has identified the widespread distribution of biotoxins and pharmaceuticals in environmental waters (marine, brackish and freshwater) highlighting the need for the development of effective techniques to generate accurate quantitative water system profiles. In this manuscript, we reviewed in situ methods known as Solid Phase Adsorption Toxin Tracking (SPATT) and Polar Organic Chemical Integrative Sampler (POCIS) for the collection and concentration of marine biotoxins, freshwater cyanotoxins and pharmaceuticals in environmental waters since the 1980s to present. Twelve different adsorption substrates in SPATT and 18 different sorbents in POCIS were reviewed for their ability to absorb a range of lipophilic and hydrophilic marine biotoxins, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, antibiotics and microcystins in marine water, freshwater and wastewater. This review suggests the gaps in reported studies, outlines future research possibilities and guides researchers who wish to work on water contaminates using Solid Phase Adsorption Toxin Tracking (SPATT) and Polar Organic Chemical Integrative Sampler (POCIS) technologies.

Sulfamerazine: Understanding the Influence of Slip Planes in the Polymorphic Phase Transformation through X-Ray Crystallographic Studies and ab Initio Lattice Dynamics.

Understanding the polymorphism exhibited by organic active-pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), in particular the relationships between crystal structure and the thermodynamics of polymorph stability, is vital for the production of more stable drugs and better therapeutics, and for the economics of the pharmaceutical industry in general. In this article, we report a detailed study of the structure-property relationships among the polymorphs of the model API, Sulfamerazine. Detailed experimental characterization using synchrotron radiation is complemented by computational modeling of the lattice dynamics and mechanical properties, in order to study the origin of differences in millability and to investigate the thermodynamics of the phase equilibria. Good agreement is observed between the simulated phonon spectra and mid-infrared and Raman spectra. The presence of slip planes, which are found to give rise to low-frequency lattice vibrations, explains the higher millability of Form I compared to Form II. Energy/volume curves for the three polymorphs, together with the temperature dependence of the thermodynamic free energy computed from the phonon frequencies, explains why Form II converts to Form I at high temperature, whereas Form III is a rare polymorph that is difficult to isolate. The combined experimental and theoretical approach employed here should be generally applicable to the study of other systems that exhibit polymorphism.

Simultaneous spectrophotometric determination of metformin hydrochloride and glibenclamide in binary mixtures using combined discrete and continuous wavelet transforms.

In this work, a combined discrete and continuous wavelet transform analysis was developed for simultaneous spectrophotometric determinations of metformin hydrochloride and glibenclamide, two antidiabetic drugs, in binary mixtures without any chemical pretreatment. Absorption spectra were subjected to the 4-level db4 discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for signal de-noising. Selected continuous wavelet transform (CWT) families (rbio3.1 with scaling factor, a = 80, and gaus2, a = 60) were applied on these de-noised signals. Finally, a zero-crossing technique was used for the construction of calibration curves for both drugs. The proposed method was validated by analyzing synthetic mixtures of the investigated drugs with various concentrations. The amount of metformin hydrochloride and glibenclamide were determined by using CWT amplitudes in zero-crossing points. The mean recovery values of metformin hydrochloride and glibenclamide were found between 98.6-102.0 and 97.9-102.4% for rbio3 and 98.3-101.2 and 97.1-101.4% for gaus2 families, respectively. The obtained results showed that the developed method is a simple, rapid and precise procedure for the simultaneous determination of metformin hydrochloride and glibenclamide in binary mixtures.