Université de Fribourg

Shear stress-responsive polymersome nanoreactors inspired by the marine bioluminescence of dinoflagellates

Rifaie‐Graham, Omar ; Galensowske, Nikolas F. B. ; Dean, Charlie ; Pollard, Jonas ; Balog, Sandor ; Gouveia, Micael G. ; Chami, Mohamed ; Vian, Antoine ; Amstad, Esther ; Lattuada, Marco ; Bruns, Nico

In: Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2020, vol. 60, no. 2, p. 904-909

Some marine plankton called dinoflagellates emit light in response to the movement of surrounding water, resulting in a phenomenon called milky seas or sea sparkle. The underlying concept, a shear-stress induced permeabilisation of biocatalytic reaction compartments, is transferred to polymer-based nanoreactors. Amphiphilic block copolymers that carry nucleobases in their hydrophobic block...

Université de Fribourg

Hemozoin-catalyzed precipitation polymerization as an assay for malaria diagnosis

Rifaie-Graham, Omar ; Pollard, Jonas ; Raccio, Samuel ; Balog, Sandor ; Rusch, Sebastian ; Hernández-Castañeda, María Andrea ; Mantel, Pierre-Yves ; Beck, Hans-Peter ; Bruns, Nico

In: Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, no. 1, p. 1369

Methods to diagnose malaria are of paramount interest to eradicate the disease. Current methods have severe limitations, as they are either costly or not sensitive enough to detect low levels of parasitemia. Here we report an ultrasensitive, yet low- resource chemical assay for the detection and quantification of hemozoin, a biomarker of all Plasmodium species. Solubilized hemozoin catalyzes...