News
March 2023
Tengetile Nxumalo (Ngeti) has past successfully her PhD viva, congratulations. The title of her PhD thesis is “ORGANOFLUORINE COMPOUNDS IN THE ENVIRONMENT” and she studied the use of ICPMS/MS and HR GFMAS in addition to LC-HRMS and LC-MS/MS for PFAS mainly in food contact material, sewage sludge, biodegradation and landfill leachates.
Ngeti from Eswatini works now at Janssen United States Pharmaceuticals in South Carolina. We wish her all the best for her future in the US.
February 2023
Conferences:
Analytical Chemistry was very active at the European Winter Conference on Plasmachemistry 2023 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. While David and Jörg gave invited keynote lectures, Simone gave a seminar for Agilent and an oral presentation. Andrea, Raquel and Viktoria gave 4 poster presentations. From the overall 260 posters Viktoria won one of the two student poster awards. Congratulations.
Publications:
Bassam shows in his newest publication, that sulfur speciation at ultra-trace levels with HPLC-ICPMS/MS is possible in a human biofluid with highly complex sulfur metabolome. This was achieved with a derivatization approach which enabled the separation of the hydrogen sulfide biomarker thiosulfate from the structurally related sulfate present at concentrations more than four orders of magnitudes higher as well as from many other major sulfur metabolites.
January 2023
Publications:
Ngeti, Abdullah and Viktoria published together with the Meermann Group at BAM Berlin a new paper about PFAS in rivers and canals in Berlin. It is suspected that the source of the PFAS are the sewage treatment plant outfalls. Target LC-MS/MS give however less than 10% of the entire organofluorines in the water which was determined by using HR GF-MAS as CaF. Congratulations to all authors.
December 2022
Magdalena was awarded one of the Bioarchäologische Gesellschaft (Austrian society for Bioarchaeology) dissertation prizes!
Publications:
Cadmium is accumulated to a high degree by some mushrooms, esp. Thelephora penicillate (a ectomycorrhizal fungus) enriches high quantities of this and other elements. Cadmium in the fruiting body of this inedible mushroom is present in different species.
Angstone has published another paper about the use of zerovalent iron use for rice and its impact on cobalt and lead accumulation
TESLA has continue to work in Geochemistry with John Parnell at Uni Aberdeen and two papers have now been published:
Ken & Joerg have published his paper from his postdoc time about Speciation of trace elements in the Bowland Shale. It appears in Geological Society Special Publication (2023) 538,1, SP534-2020-195
David, Raquel and Joerg have published a paper about trace element geochemistry in the earliest terrestrial ecosystem, the Rhynie Chert, Scotland. This is published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (2022).
November 2022
Sieglinde Zelzer celebrated her doctorate on 7 December. She dealt with vitamin D in her dissertation "Development of new LC-MS/MS methods for the determination of different vitamin D metabolites in human and environmental samples". She did her research from 2018 to 2022 in the ACHE working group alongside her work. A great achievement. Congratulations!
Publications:
Georg was involved in the research for the now published paper “Enterotoxin tilimycin from gut-resident Klebsiella promotes mutational evolution and antibiotic resistance in mice” showing that tilimycin encourages antibiotic resistance in other present gut-pathogens.
Sieglindes’ paper about the method development for the determination of Vitamin D2 in mushrooms got published. Her newly developed method allows the determination of Vitamin D2 in mushrooms down to a level of 0.05 µg / g dry sample.
Bassam and Walter were involved in method development for the determination of trimethylselenonium ion in urine via LC-hydride generation AFS. During hydride generation dimethylselenide is formed not H2Se. The method was applied to a number of urine samples showing that some people excrete significantly more trimethlyselenonium ions than others.
October 2022
Publications:
New Publication in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry. In collaboration with scientists of the University of Technology Sydney in Australia, Raquel (TESLA) and David (nμLab) published a novel automated and miniaturised reactor for the extraction and accelerated digestion of proteins in complex matrices such as serum.
Martin, Nan and Camilla defended successfully their PhD research and passed their Vivas at the University of Aberdeen. Martin’s research area was mercury and its interactions with organic solvents, arsenic and arsenic speciation were the subjects of Nan’s and Camilla’s research. Congratulations to all three of them.
Publications:
Angstone's Study of metal contamination in rice paddy soils in Malawi is now online.
Conferences:
TESLA was very successful at the largest conference for Analytical Chemistry in South America. Jörg gave the opening plenary in front on more than 800 participants at the 20th Brazilian Meeting for Analytical Chemistry (ENQA) in Bento Goncalves. And Cicero (Guest researcher at Graz last year) won the best poster award from more than 200 poster for his contribution “Studying the effect of arsenic on the metabolism of unicellular algae (C.reinhardii) in collaboration with the Bioscience Institute in Graz. Congratulations…
August 2022
Publications:
In some rice samples from America, an unusual arsenic compound was identified: the dimethylarsonyldimethylarsinic acid, one of the few known compounds containing several arsenic atoms per molecule.
