The rapid developments in nanostructured materials and nanotechnology is starting to have a profound impact in many applications of the biomedical areas, including biomolecules, tissue engineering, and detection of biomarkers, cancer diagnosis, cancer therapy, and bioimaging. Nanotechnology applications hinge frequently on the availability in well-characterized size distributions for gold nanoparticles. In this work we implemented a methodology in order to determine gold nanoparticles size by using the UV-Vis spectra and the multivariate analysis with the principal components' analysis method. The sample size of gold nanoparticles used for correlation of this methodology were previously known (5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 80 nm), they were supplied by Sigma Aldrich and Ted Pella Inc. All GNPs were measurement with a spectrometer Shimadzu UV-VIS 1800 Rayleigh model over the range from 400 to 700 nm. The UV-VIS spectra was compared with the implemented methodology in order to show excellent behavior and similitude in results, which one suggests this is an outstanding usefully tool to determine the gold nanoparticle diameter.

Microbial degradation of aromatic hydrocarbons is an emerging technology, and it is well recognized for its economic methods, efficiency, and safety; however, its exploration is still scarce and greater emphasis on cyanobacteria–bacterial mutualistic interactions is needed. We evaluated and characterized the phenanthrene biodegradation capacity of consortium dominated by Fischerella sp. under holoxenic conditions with aerobic heterotrophic bacteria and their molecular identification through 16S rRNA Illumina sequencing. Results indicated that our microbial consortium can degrade up to 92% of phenanthrene in five days. Bioinformatic analyses revealed that consortium was dominated by Fischerella sp., however different members of Nostocaceae and Weeksellaceae, as well as several other bacteria, such as Chryseobacterium, and Porphyrobacter, were found to be putatively involved in the biological degradation of phenanthrene. This work contributes to a better understanding of biodegradation of phenanthrene by cyanobacteria and identify the microbial diversity related.

Raman spectroscopy (RS) is an inelastic scattering technique that is being recently applied in pharmaceutical applications. In this work this technique was applied to analyze the differences in concentrations of a commercial pharmaceutical form of an acetylsalicylic acid derivative present in tablets manufactured by five different laboratories (A, B, C, D and E). Meyer brand acetylsalicylic acid reagent was used to obtain spectral data as active principle. Five samples of different laboratories were also analyzed. We used a Raman microscopy device Horiba-JY HR800 with an excitation source of 830 nm and 17 mW. Raw data were analyzed by an arithmetic difference between the active substance from each different laboratory sample. Principal component analysis (PCA) was also applied to the spectral set to verify the differences in each pharmaceutical form of acetylsalicylic acid. We found a correlation of 0.7 between laboratory A and the active substance, and 0.98 between all spectra of the same laboratory A, we conclude that this drug was elaborated with better quality control. Results indicate that Raman spectroscopy can be applied in the pharmaceutical industry to determine adulteration or alteration in pharmaceutical formulations. We have demonstrate that RS together with PCA can be used as a fast and nondestructive method to determine the characteristics of the molecules present in commercially available drugs with very short acquisition times of few seconds.