Integrated data-driven cross-disciplinary framework to prevent chemical water pollution.

Access to a clean and healthy environment is a human right and a prerequisite for maintaining a sustainable ecosystem. Experts across domains along the chemical life cycle have traditionally operated in isolation, leading to limited connectivity between upstream chemical innovation to downstream development of water-treatment technologies. This fragmented and historically reactive approach to managing emerging contaminants has resulted in significant externalized societal costs.

Addressing chemical pollution in biodiversity research.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution are planetary-scale emergencies requiring urgent mitigation actions. As these "triple crises" are deeply interlinked, they need to be tackled in an integrative manner. However, while climate change and biodiversity are often studied together, chemical pollution as a global change factor contributing to worldwide biodiversity loss has received much less attention in biodiversity research so far.

An algorithm to classify homologous series within compound datasets.

Homologous series are groups of related compounds that share the same core structure attached to a motif that repeats to different degrees. Compounds forming homologous series are of interest in multiple domains, including natural products, environmental chemistry, and drug design. However, many homologous compounds remain unannotated as such in compound datasets, which poses obstacles to understanding chemical diversity and their analytical identification via database matching.

The Next Frontier of Environmental Unknowns: Substances of Unknown or Variable Composition, Complex Reaction Products, or Biological Materials (UVCBs).

Substances of unknown or variable composition, complex reaction products, or biological materials (UVCBs) are over 70 000 "complex" chemical mixtures produced and used at significant levels worldwide. Due to their unknown or variable composition, applying chemical assessments originally developed for individual compounds to UVCBs is challenging, which impedes sound management of these substances. Across the analytical sciences, toxicology, cheminformatics, and regulatory practice, new approaches addressing specific aspects of UVCB assessment are being developed, albeit in a fragmented manner.

Discovering pesticides and their TPs in Luxembourg waters using open cheminformatics approaches.

The diversity of hundreds of thousands of potential organic pollutants and the lack of (publicly available) information about many of them is a huge challenge for environmental sciences, engineering, and regulation. Suspect screening based on high-resolution liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) has enormous potential to help characterize the presence of these chemicals in our environment, enabling the detection of known and newly emerging pollutants, as well as their potential transformation products (TPs). Here, suspect list creation (focusing on pesticides relevant for Luxembourg, incorporating data sources in 4 languages) was coupled to an automated retrieval of related TPs from PubChem based on high confidence suspect hits, to screen for pesticides and their TPs in Luxembourgish river samples.

Occurrence and Distribution of Pharmaceuticals and Their Transformation Products in Luxembourgish Surface Waters.

Pharmaceuticals and their transformation products (TPs) are continuously released into the aquatic environment via anthropogenic activity. To expand knowledge on the presence of pharmaceuticals and their known TPs in Luxembourgish rivers, 92 samples collected during routine monitoring events between 2019 and 2020 were investigated using nontarget analysis. Water samples were concentrated using solid-phase extraction and then analyzed using liquid chromatography coupled to a high-resolution mass spectrometer.

Evaluating the environmental parameters that determine aerobic biodegradation half-lives of pesticides in soil with a multivariable approach.

Aerobic biodegradation half-lives (half-lives) are key parameters used to evaluate pesticide persistence in soil. However, half-life estimates for individual pesticides often span several orders of magnitude, reflecting the impact that various environmental or experimental parameters have on half-lives in soil. In this work, we collected literature-reported half-lives for eleven pesticides along with associated metadata describing the environmental or experimental conditions under which they were derived.

Solid waste management of small island developing states-the case of the Seychelles: a systemic and collaborative study of Swiss and Seychellois students to support policy.

Solid waste management (SWM) is a significant challenge for the Seychelles. Waste generation, fueled by economic development and tourism, increases steadily, while landfilling continues to be the main disposal path, thus exacerbating the island nation's specific weaknesses. Due to the small scale of the Seychelles economy, there is little capital available to stimulate innovations in SWM and generate the knowledge for setting priorities and guiding SWM action.