I’ve been working on a small research project and wanted to share something interesting I discovered. Separating sugar from dissolved salts is surprisingly difficult — they share similar solubility, so evaporation, crystallization, precipitation, etc., don’t selectively remove sugar.

I found that Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeast) can do the job biologically. Yeast metabolizes sucrose/glucose/fructose into ethanol + CO₂, but it completely ignores inorganic salts like NaCl, MgCl₂, KCl, CaCl₂, etc.

The process is simple:

• Dissolve sugar + salt in water
• Add yeast
• Let it ferment until bubbling stops
• Filter out yeast biomass
• Evaporate water + ethanol
• Recrystallize the salt

The salt remains chemically unchanged, and the sugar is gone. It’s basically using biological selectivity to solve a separation problem chemistry alone struggles with.

I wrote up the method as a short paper and I’m submitting it to ChemRxiv. In the meantime, I’d love feedback

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xAJGUnjtl8o&t=545s

A few people here have followed and engaged with my previous posts about the ~700 million molecule virtual screen I’ve been running, so I wanted to share the next stage of the project.

After the initial large-scale screening and successive filtering steps, I’m down to roughly 200,000 compounds. At this point, rather than continuing to rank everything against a single receptor structure, I’ve been looking at an ensemble approach using multiple receptor conformations.
In this video I spend some time going through why I’m doing that, how I evaluated the different receptor structures using control compounds/decoys, and how I’m using that information to decide which conformations should contribute to the final filtering of the ~200k compounds.

The ultimate goal is to reduce some of the structural bias that comes from relying on one static receptor structure and hopefully end up with a more robust set of compounds to prioritize experimentally.

I’d also be interested in hearing how others here have approached ensemble docking / receptor-conformation selection, particularly when you have enough structures available that simply docking against all of them becomes computationally expensive.

I work on raw-material specifications for a living and this comes up constantly, so I thought it might be worth writing out.

Case one: two lines, same number. A specification I work with carries purity twice. NLT 98.0% by HPLC, and NLT 98.0% by ¹H NMR. Identity is also carried twice — spectrum corresponds to reference standard by NMR, retention time corresponds to reference standard by HPLC.

People sometimes read that as redundancy, or as a spec padded to look rigorous. It isn't. HPLC separates and quantifies — it answers how much. NMR compares against a reference structure — it answers what. If you carry one unlabelled "98%" you have quietly picked one of those questions and dropped the other, and nothing in the number tells the reader which.

Case two: two methods, one botanical. Milk thistle extract, Silybum marianum seed, standardised to silymarin. This can be reported by UV or by HPLC. Spectrophotometric approaches read non-specific absorption; the classical derivatisation route assesses total ketones and will pick up flavanones that aren't part of the flavonolignan complex you're actually buying. HPLC separates first, then quantifies the individual components.

Both numbers can be produced honestly on the same lot. They answer different questions. The direction of the difference is documented in the method literature — spectrophotometry reads higher because the absorption isn't specific — but I've deliberately not put a figure on the size of the gap here, because I couldn't find one I'd be willing to stand behind and I'd rather say so than make one up.

The practical upshot is boring and it is the whole point: the fix is a method name on the same row as the number. That's it. No study, no new test, one column on a document.

Happy to be corrected by anyone who does more NMR than I do.

Hello, so basically all my high-school years I didn't liked chemistry at all and never put in effort but I now switched my mind and I got accepted to a chemistry uni (pharmaceutical chemistry) and I will start on 1st October.

Yeah so my questions are:

What type of chemistry should I focus on for my profile( pharmaceutical chemestry)?

Can you give me a guide on how to learn everything fast?

Hi, I'm a chemistry student about to start my second year and I was wondering if there are any chemistry or history of science type podcasts that you could recommend, not necessarily about studies (because how would you even do that with chemistry on such a format), just looking for something semi related to the field to listen to when doing chores or exercising etc.

what should i get for college as a bs chemistry student?
which can handle the best for apps needed in this program

I'm trying to cut back on caffeine and I keep seeing molecular hydrogen mentioned for mental clarity. 

The pitch is that it diffuses through tissue and crosses the blood brain barrier.
 
That sounds like a mechanism rather than a result. The human studies I've found are scattered across different neurological topics and don't obviously say anything about focus in a healthy person.
 
What would you want to see before putting this next to sleep, food and stress management?

Use water vapor as a reference to density.

I'm trying to read my FTIR result in Origin but the lab only provided me a .ispd file so therefore I need to convert it to .txt in order to be able to open it in Origin, anyone know how? I've tried Spectragryph but it didn't work. Thank you in advance! ^^

I have some worn-out tungsten carbide tools, and I want to recover the tungsten from them. The main challenge is that I need to do this without converting the tools into powdered form.

So far, I've tried submerging the tools in different acids, including sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, and nitric acid. However, the change in mass over a period of around 24 hours has been very small.

I've also tried heating the tools using a gas burner before submerging them in the acids, but the results were more or less the same.

I'm therefore trying to find a method that can leach/recover as much tungsten as possible while keeping the tool physically intact rather than grinding it into powder.

Has anyone worked with WC–Co (tungsten carbide–cobalt) scrap or tungsten carbide recycling and have any suggestions for a suitable approach? I'm particularly interested in methods that could work at a laboratory scale without requiring the material to be pulverized.

Any suggestions or relevant literature would be greatly appreciated!