Chemical education

Preparing the next generation of pharmacists to succeed in practice and provide premier care starts with ensuring pharmacy education standards are met and align with innovative practices and that education incorporates topics that are important to promoting health. For example, recent reports link endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) to numerous diseases such as reproductive disorders, metabolic diseases, and developmental abnormalities. Considering the suboptimal awareness and knowledge about EDCs, it is imperative to provide public health education through a pharmacy curriculum...

There are places on earth that are considered to possess extreme physico-chemical characteristics as they relate to life. Surprisingly, there are microbes that have adapted various strategies that enable them to form robust communities in these environments. The microbes that live in these environments, called extremophiles, are described as being thermophilic, psychrophilic, halophilic, acidophilic, alkaliphilic, barophilic, and so on. Given that extremophiles were not discovered until relatively recently due to a view point that the environments in which they inhabited were not conducive to life, it is reasonable to conclude that the concept of extremophiles may be hard to grasp for students...

INTRODUCTION: In recent decades, an increase in natural disasters has led to the Natech events occurrence, which are technological accidents triggered by natural hazards. This study aims to assess the risk of chemical release of the H2 S toxic gas following an earthquake from the refinery. METHOD: The Natech risk assessment was carried out in potential earthquake risk scenarios via a semi-quantitative method using Rapid-N software. The reference scenario was obtained using the Australian SMUG Model, which has presented precise prioritization...

The two-week protein biochemistry experience described herein focuses on reinforcing key biochemical concepts and achieving significant learning domain accomplishments for students (Content Knowledge, Logical Mathematical Reasoning, Visualization, Information Literacy, and Knowledge Integration) and valuable teaching opportunities for instructors. The experience encompasses an exploration of the transport protein serum transferrin as an important regulator of Fe(III) biochemistry and incorporates techniques to assess protein-metal stoichiometry and protein stability and to perform molecular visualization...

INTRODUCTION: The threat of chemical, biological, radiologic, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNe) terrorist attacks has increased over time. The need for rapid and effective responses to such attacks is paramount. Effective medical counter-measures to CBRNe events are critical and training for such may effectively occur early in physician training. While some medical specialties are more involved than others, counter-terrorism medicine (CTM) spans all medical specialties. METHODS: All United States allopathic medical schools were examined via online curriculums and queries for academic content related to CBRNe and terrorist medical counter-measures...

BACKGROUND: Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are man-made chemicals that are slow to break down in the environment and widely detected in humans. Epidemiological evidence suggests that prenatal exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a legacy PFAS, is linked to gestational hypertension and preeclampsia. However, the relationship between other PFAS, which are structurally similar, and these outcomes remains largely understudied, despite biologic plausibility. Here, we examined associations between serum PFAS mixtures in relation to hypertensive disorders of pregnancy within a birth cohort of African Americans...

BACKGROUND: Results of studies investigating associations between individual endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and incidence of uterine leiomyomata (UL), a hormone-dependent gynecological condition, have been inconsistent. However, few studies have evaluated simultaneous exposure to a mixture of EDCs with UL incidence. METHODS: We conducted a case-cohort analysis (n=708) of data from the Study of the Environment, Lifestyle and Fibroids (SELF), a prospective cohort study...

AIMS: The present study aimed to use a conventional and metagenomic approach to investigate the microbiological diversity of water bodies in a network of drainage channels and rivers located in the central area of the city of Belém, Northern Brazil, which is considered one of the largest cities in the Brazilian Amazon. METHODS AND RESULTS: In eight of the analyzed points, both bacterial and viral microbiological indicators of environmental contamination, the physical-chemical and metals were assessed...

BACKGROUND: Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are widely detected in pregnant women and associated with adverse outcomes related to impaired placental function. Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) is a dimeric glycoprotein hormone that can indicate placental toxicity. OBJECTIVES: Our aim was to quantify the association of serum PFAS with placental hCG, measured as an intact molecule (hCG), as free alpha-(<mml:math xmlns:mml="https://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mrow><mml:mtext>hCG</mml:mtext><mml:mi>α</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:math>) and beta-subunits (<mml:math xmlns:mml="https://www...

Chemical tools and principles have become central to biological and medical research/applications by leveraging a range of classical organic chemistry reactions. Friedel-Crafts alkylation and acylation are arguably some of the most well-known and used synthetic methods for the preparation of small molecules but their use in biological and medical fields is relatively less frequent than the other reactions, possibly owing to the notion of their plausible incompatibility with biological systems. This review demonstrates advances in Friedel-Crafts alkylation and acylation reactions in a variety of biomolecular chemistry fields...

SIGNIFICANCE: Acute wounds such as severe burns and chronic wounds like diabetic ulcers present a significant threat to human health. Wound dressings made from natural polymers offer inherent properties that effectively enhance wound healing outcomes and reduce healing time. RECENT ADVANCES: Numerous innovative hydrogels are being developed and translated to the clinic to successfully treat various wound types. This underscores the substantial potential of hydrogels in the future wound care market...

Literature reported drug poisoning as a major cause for visiting emergency departments, with various rates of occurrences across countries, regions, socioeconomic status, and cultures. Therefore, this study was conducted in Qassim to describe the sociodemographic patterns of acute drug poisoning as well as the most common drugs involved. A retrospective method of data collection was used employing medical record review for drug poisoning cases that occurred in the Qassim region during the 8 years from January 2008 to December 2015...

Pesticides are chemical constituents used to prevent or control pests, including insects, rodents, fungi, weeds, and other unwanted organisms. Despite their advantages in crop production and disease management, the use of pesticides poses significant hazards to the environment and public health. Pesticide elements have now perpetually entered our atmosphere and subsequently contaminated water, food, and soil, leading to health threats ranging from acute to chronic toxicities. Pesticides can cause acute toxicity if a high dose is inhaled, ingested, or comes into contact with the skin or eyes, while prolonged or recurrent exposure to pesticides leads to chronic toxicity...

The goal of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee WInSTEP SEPA program is to provide valuable and relevant research experiences to students and instructors in diverse secondary educational settings. Introducing an online experience allows the expansion of a proven instructional research program to a national scale and removes many common barriers. These can include lack of access to zebrafish embryos, laboratory equipment, and modern classroom facilities, which often deny disadvantaged and underrepresented students from urban and rural school districts valuable inquiry-based learning opportunities...

Polymer science is receiving wider acceptance in the organic chemistry community; thus, it is imperative to include it in the undergraduate organic chemistry curriculum. Despite the ever-increasing popularity of the topic of polymer chemistry in undergraduate curricula, a comprehensive laboratory experiment module describing a polypeptide synthesis by ring-opening polymerization of N-carboxyanhydride (NCA ROP) and a homopolymer synthesis by activators-regenerated by electron-transfer for atom transfer radical polymerization (ARGET ATRP) has yet to be proposed...

The pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing industry has become the largest industrial sector for the employment of chemists, indicating a need for experiments with a pharmaceutical sciences context in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. In the pharmaceutical industry, testing drug dissolution is a key analytical task for solid oral dosage forms that is performed in different phases of drug development to test the release behavior of new formulations, ensure consistency between manufacturing lots, and help predict the in vivo absorption of the drug substance after administration...

The effectiveness of active learning on promoting students' academic outcomes and persistence has been established in the literature. However, despite the effort of purposeful change agents, the uptake of active learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is slow. While previous research from the chemistry education community has provided insights into the implementation of specific active learning strategies across the United States, the extent to which chemistry instructors leverage these strategies in general remains unknown...

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) may play a role in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD); however, studies on the combined effects of EDC mixtures on NAFLD development are limited. Here, we explored the association between exposure to EDC mixtures and NAFLD and investigated the potential mediating role of metabolic syndrome (MetS). We included participants from the Korean National Environmental Health Survey Cycle 4 (2018-2020) and quantified the urinary concentrations of various EDCs-eight phthalate metabolites, three phenols, one antibacterial compound, four parabens, four polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and one pyrethroid pesticide metabolite-as well as serum concentrations of five perfluorinated compounds (PFCs)...

The IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) is a structure-based chemical identifier that encodes various aspects of a chemical structure into a hierarchically layered line notation. Because InChI is non-proprietary, open-source, and freely available to everyone, it is adopted in popular chemical information resources and software programs. This paper describes the InChI Open Education Resource (OER) (https://www.inchi-trust.org/oer/), designed to provide educators and other interested parties with resources, training material, and information related to InChI...

OBJECTIVE: To assess pediatric disaster medicine (PDM) instruction in emergency medicine (EM) residency programs and to identify barriers to integrating these skills into EM training. METHODS: National survey study of United States EM Residency Program Directors (PDs) and Assistant PDs during the 2021-2022 academic year. RESULTS: Of the 186 EM residency programs identified, a total of 24 responses were recorded with a response rate of 12.9 percent...