Phosphorus affects the sorption of many metals and arsenate to iron (hydr)oxides. This may influence the mobility and bioavailability of metals and arsenate in soil and water. Phosphorus therefore plays an important role in, e.g., determining the ecotoxicological risk of contaminants in soils. The overall aim of this thesis was to improve the understanding of lead(II), copper(II), cadmium(II) a...

Copper ions play an important role in ethylene receptor biogenesis and proper function. The copper transporter RESPONSIVE-TO-ANTAGONIST1 (RAN1) is essential for copper ion transport in Arabidopsis thaliana. However it is still unclear how copper ions are delivered to RAN1 and how copper ions affect ethylene receptors. There is not a specific copper chelator which could be used to explore these ...

This paper describes a simple platform that employs spiropyran-functionalized semiconducting polymer dots as a fluorescent probe for photoactivated ratiometric and sensitive Cu(2+) detection, in which the sensing mechanism is based on photogenerated merocyanine that can selectively bind Cu(2+) to induce Förster resonance energy transfer.

An enzyme-free and label-free fluorescence turn on biosensor for amplified copper(II) ion (Cu(2+)) detection has been constructed based on self-assembled DNA concatamers and Sybr Green I. This assay is simple, inexpensive and sensitive, enabling quantitative detection of as low as 12.8 pM Cu(2+).

Ion flotation is an efficient separation technique for the recovery of metal ions from dilute aqueous solutions. Provided that both collected and surfactant are recovered foam phase, it could be considered as alternative to ion exchange, adsorption or solvent extraction in hydrometallurgy. However, most studies focusing only on by neglect development a closed-loop flow sheet with regeneration c...

The anisotropy of polarization in a 1D copper(II)-based coordination polymer was investigated experimentally and theoretically for the first time, revealing that the origin of the ferroelectricity and its anisotropic nature are closely related to the coordination geometry of the metal ion and the packing mode of the coordination polymer.

DNA-based catalysis can be used to control the enantioselectivity of copper-catalysed Diels-Alder and Friedel-Crafts reactions to produce either enantiomer of the product by changing the denticity of the ligand coordinated to the Cu(II) ion, even though the DNA adopts a right handed helical conformation only.