NEWS

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UNESCO funds Water Desalination Chair at King Saud University

In a move taken to complement Saudi Arabia’s major desalination pro-

gramme, King Saud University (KSU) has established a Water Desalination Research Chair funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The chair’s purpose is to estimate the number of water desalination facilities (and their capacity) that are needed to accom-modate the country’s needs, assess the most advantageous locations for the facilities and recommend the necessary technology needed in the expansion process.

Saudi Arabia has nearly 30 water desalination plants in which salt and minerals are extracted from sea water. Three years ago it opened, on the shores of the Persian Gulf, what is believed to be the world’s largest desalination plant – a facility that cost $3.8 billion but an investment worth every cent considering that the nation, where temperatures frequently soar far above 38°C (100°F), relies on desalination for 70% of its drinking water.

Estimates and assessments offered by the new chair will help national officials to determine the reliability of long-term decisions involving capital budgets necessary to avert any shortage of water supply and resources. The chair will be active in two phases of the Kingdom’s water desalination network.

The first will be to draft short-term and long-term plans that will include analysing current water consumption and desalination methods, developing the anticipated methods for the desalination process, defining future desalination requirements, discovering means to improve alternate technologies, economic studies, assessing investment capital and assess-ing possible environmental consequences of water desalination.

The second phase will address means of improving initial water treatment technology using membrane-based systems, an important issue considering the increased use of reverse osmosis.

Preliminary treatment in water desalina-tion has a major impact on attaining the most efficient technology. The chair will conduct research to establish a better understanding of the relationship between treatment and advanced treatment, as well as the importance of preliminary treatment and improving it to reduce excess and the size of desalination plants.

The chair also plans to accumulate a database and establish an environment that will promote further research in preliminary water desalina-tion treatment technology, which is critical in the achievement of sustainable development.

The KSU Desalination Chair is a fulfilment of a UNESCO promise made several years ago. The international organisation agreed that after positive assessments were made, it would fund two research chairs, one in desalination and the other in childhood studies.

Contacts:

King Saud University, PO Box 2454 ,Riyadh 11451,

Saudi Arabia. Tel: +966 1 467 0888, http://ksu.edu.sa

UNESCO, 7 place de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris 07 SP,

France. Tel: +33 1 4568 10 00, www.unesco.org

FortéBio launches bio-sensor for protein analysis

Pall FortéBio Corp, a division of Pall Life Sciences and a supplier of

label-free technology that accelerates the development of bio-therapeutic and pharmaceutical products, has introduced its Dip and Read Ni-NTA bio-sensor for use on its Octet and Blitz instrumentation platforms.

The new bio-sensor is pre-immobilised with novel nickel-charged tri-nitrilotriacetic (Tri-NTA) groups enabling an easy, rapid and direct method for quantitation and kinetic analysis of polyhistidine-tagged (HIS-tagged) biomol-ecules, says the company.

‘Nickel provides an excellent binding medi-um for the stable capture of HIS-tagged pro-teins as part of quantitation and characterisa-tion studies,’ explained Christopher Silva, Vice President of Marketing, FortéBio.

‘However, standard formats for using this medium have been cumbersome, time-consum-ing and expensive. Now, our new Ni-NTA bio-sensor enables scientists to quickly and easily analyse HIS-fusion proteins with unsurpassed ease of use and work-flow efficiency.’

The Ni-NTA bio-sensor is designed for use in buffer and diluted complex media. Each bio-sensor also can be regenerated up to ten times via a standard low-pH protocol in as little as two minutes for various applications, such as the acquisition of replicate data (same ligand/analyte pair) and “bucket-based” screening.

FortéBio’s Octet family of products is based on its proprietary BioLayer Interferometry (BLI) technology. It incorporates disposable optical ‘‘Dip and Read’’ bio-sensors that meas-

ure multiple interactions in parallel, without the use of detection agents.

For single-sample analysis, FortéBio recently launched its Blitz platform. According to the company, this platform revolutionises the use of label-free protein analysis by making it more accessible to individual, bench scientists in bio-therapeutic discovery, process development and academic research.

Contacts:

Pall FortéBio Corp, Menlo Science & Technology Park,

1360 Willow Road, Suite 201, Menlo Park, CA 94025,

USA. Tel: +1 650 322 1360, www.fortébio.com

Pall Corp, 25 Harbor Park Drive, Port Washington,

NY 11050, USA. Tel: +1 516 484 5400, www.pall.com

Controlling the shape and content of nano-wires

Scientists in USA at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) say they have devel-oped a way of controlling the composi-tion and structure of nano-wires.

The team of researchers has found a way of precisely controlling the width and composi-tion of these tiny strands as they grow, making it possible to grow complex structures that are optimally designed for particular applications.

Nano-wires are of great interest because struc-tures with such tiny dimensions – typically just a few tens of nanometres, or billionths of a meter, in diameter – can have very different properties than the same materials have in their larger form. That is, in part, because at such minuscule scales, quan-tum confinement effects – based on the behaviour of electrons and phonons within the material – begin to play a significant role in the material’s behaviour, which can affect how it conducts elec-tricity and heat or interacts with light.

In addition, because nano-wires have an espe-cially large amount of surface area in relation to their volume, they can be used as sensors. Nano-wires are grown by using “seed” particles – metal nano-particles that determine the size and composition of the nano-wire. By adjusting the amount of gases used in growing the nano-wires the researchers were able to control the size and composition of the seed particles and, therefore, the nano-wires as they grew.

‘We are able to control both of these prop-erties simultaneously,’ said Silvija Grade ak, Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT.

While the researchers carried out their nano-wire-growth experiments with indium nitride

Membrane Technology August 2012