The Effects of Gamma Irradiation on Chemical Biomarker Recovery from Mixed Chemical/Biological Threat Exposure Specimens.

Background: Irradiative sterilization of clinical specimens prior to chemical laboratory testing provides a way to not only sterilize pathogens and ensure laboratorian safety but also preserve sample volume and maintain compatibility with quantitative chemical diagnostic protocols. Since the compatibility of clinical biomarkers with gamma irradiation is not well characterized, a subset of diagnostic biomarkers ranging in molecular size, concentration, and clinical matrix was analyzed to determine recovery following gamma irradiation.

Methods: Sample irradiation of previously characterized quality control materials (QCs) at 5 Mrad was carried out at the Gamma Cell Irradiation Facility at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, GA.

Designing traceable opioid material kits to improve laboratory testing during the U.S. opioid overdose crisis.

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the White House declared a public health emergency to address the opioid crisis (Hargan, 2017).

Understanding Internal Chirality Induction of Triarylsilyl Ethers Formed from Enantiopure Alcohols.

Chirality transmission from point chirality to helical chirality was explored using triarylsilyl ethers. Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy was employed to show that the alcohol stereocenter of silylated, enantiopure secondary alcohols can transmit chirality to the aryl groups on the silicon resulting in a higher population of one helical conformation over another. Cotton effects characteristic of the aryl groups organized into one preferred conformation were observed for all of the compounds examined, which included both triphenyl- and trinaphthylsilyl groups.

Silylation-based kinetic resolution of monofunctional secondary alcohols.

The nucleophilic small molecule catalyst (-)-tetramisole was found to catalyze the kinetic resolution of monofunctional secondary alcohols via enantioselective silylation. Optimization of this new methodology allows for selectivity factors up to 25 utilizing commercially available reagents and mild reaction conditions.