Projects

The overconsumption of sugar is one of the main reasons cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes have reached pandemic proportions. While the obvious solution would be to eat less and make healthier lifestyle choices, the desire for sweetness in our food remains strong. Artificial sweeteners are widely used to lower calorie intake. Several of them, however, are suspected to pose health risks of their own, and many do not taste as well as sucrose, often leaving a lingering off-taste. The development of novel sweeteners is hindered by the scarcity of measurable data on what constitutes an ideal non-caloric sweetener. We aim to develop biochemical assays to determine these metrics, facilitating the discovery of healthy, sustainable, and good-tasting sweeteners.

Using surface plasmon resonance and calorimetry, the binding of hypertriglyceridemia drug candidates to lipoprotein lipase was tested.

Development of adaptable supramolecular chirality sensors is important for the industry and academia. Chiral molecules, in nform of enantiomers, are commonly used in the pharmaceutical, food, perfume, cosmetic, and agricultural industries. In biological ecosystems, chiral molecules are metabolized, absorbed, and excreted selectively, and their biological effects can vary significantly. Therefore, the environmental impact of different stereoisomers can be radically different. Standard analysis methods that do not distinguish the chirality of molecules may underestimate the effects of these compounds. In this project, we designed and synthesized new receptor molecules through both supramolecular interactions and covalent bonding. By investigating the structure, optical, and supramolecular properties of the obtained receptor molecules, we reached several new compounds with the potential to be applied for separation, isolation, and detection of bioactive compounds and environmental pollutants. We developed environmentally friendly mechanosynthesis methods to reduce waste production during the synthesis process of organic compounds. Additionally, we studied formation of oligomeric macrocyclic receptors and developed methods for obtaining both mono- and multifunctional macrocyclic compounds. We initiated research on the creation of supramolecular materials and demonstrated that materials for enantioselective electronic noses can be easily prepared using porphyrins and chiral hemicucurbiturils. We also investigated the correlation between the circulardichroism signal generation and molecular orbitals and geometries modelled by quantum chemical methods. We also showed that the signal of the studied optically active sensor molecules can be amplified via interaction with inorganic chiral materials. The results of the project were published in number of research articles and two patents were applied for.

Design and testing of antihypertriglyceridemic peptides in human plasma

Regulation of Lipoprotein Lipase Activity in Human Plasma

A prototype allowing a rapid diagnostic possibility of COVID-19 has been developed. The principle of operation of the prototype differs drastically from widespread lateral flow COVID-19 express diagnostics tests currently available on the market. Namely, the prototype is a combination of sensor chip modified with the synthetic receptor and a portable potentiostat. The synthetic receptors were prepared by molecularly imprinting technology and targeted against nucleocapsid (N) and spike (S) SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins. It was shown that the prototype was capable of detecting the target proteins from patients’ nasopharyngeal samples in 15 min through measurement of the redox reaction intensity at the chip after its incubation in the mentioned sample. The prototype has the following advantages over lateral flow tests: (i) employment of the synthetic receptors as sensitive elements instead of their biological counterparts provides a more cost effective and stable diagnostics tool in whole; (ii) about hundredfold lower LOD allows diagnosis of COVID-19 at earlier stage; (iii) measurement of concentration of the proteins allows estimate viral load. Therefore, the prototype has the outstanding innovative potential for its further development to offer a reliable COVID-19 express diagnostic tool. Such a tool can be employed in clinical institutions for example in primary care physician practices, emergency medicine etc. The tool could be also developed for point-of-care and personal use at home as well in order to reduce load on healthcare systems and prevent additional risks for passing on the infection to other people. It should be noted that in this project we managed, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, to apply the molecular imprinting technology for detection of SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins. The results were published as a scientific paper in the top interdisciplinary journal devoted to biosensors, which has already received multiple citations.