April 30, 2021
At the beginning of April, colleagues congratulated Professor of the Department of Analytical Chemistry and Chemical Ecology Sergei Shtykov on winning the competition for initiative projects of Russian Science Foundation. In the next three years his project titled the Multifunctional Nanoplatforms as a Tool for Concentration and Determination of Biologically Active Substances will be carried out at the Department of Analytical Chemistry and Chemical Ecology. The scientific merits of the Honoured Scientist of the Russian Federation Sergei Shtykov are worthy of a separate story. Today we will focus on his latest research related to nanochemistry and nanotechnology.
– Mr. Shtykov, once fundamental discoveries in chemistry contributed to the opening of a huge number of industrial enterprises throughout the country. Should we expect new breakthroughs in fundamental chemistry?
– In the 21st century, the goals of research, methods, and application of new discoveries are seriously changing. If earlier technologies for the production of materials in large volumes, for example, oil products, steel or alloys – were of great importance, today science is increasingly focused on creating intellectual products. Breakouts often occur in areas where not everything can be seen with the naked eye. A striking example is research in nanotechnology, which should be ahead of the needs of practicing scientists and, based on the effects found, help them develop and use new materials.
Thus, the role of fundamental knowledge increases significantly. Experts now study the substance (which, in fact, is what chemistry does) not so much in breadth as in depth. It is important to understand such states of it that are inaccessible to ordinary microscopes, they can only be studied by special ones – atomic force, scanning tunnelling.
We live at the beginning of the nanotechnology era, which is already marked by the discovery of a number of amazing effects. They allow creating unique technologies of the future with a relatively small investment. For example, new computers based on discoveries in microelectronics, or, as they say now, in nanoelectronics, will use nanoparticles capable of self-organising and creating certain periodic structures. Nanoparticles are already used in medicine to deliver drugs directly to the affected organ. With their help, physicians will be able to more accurately assess areas of disease in the human body.
Chemical processes underlie both biological and physical phenomena. That is why today it is increasingly said that the emergence of nanoscience, in a sense, brought us back to ancient times, when the world was perceived as a single, whole, and the methods of cognition were not yet divided into separate research areas. For the same reason, today many research teams, including those at our university, increasingly unite chemists, physicists, biologists, physicians, and materials scientists. Studying nanoparticles, we are trying with simpler and more accessible means to reproduce the processes of self-organisation of nature that have been formed over millions of years. It is not easy to imagine, but modern nanotechnology already allows us to control individual molecules and even atoms, but more importantly, combining them into nanoparticles of the desired size and shape, that is, the targeted production of nanomaterials.
– Nanotechnology was widely discussed 20 years ago. At one time, there were a lot of journalistic publications on this topic. Do you think that the public interest in this topic has cooled down a little?
– This is natural. Once the outbreak of mass interest was caused by the appearance in 1996 of the book by an American scientist Eric Drexler (Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology), in which he described the possible dire consequences of the development of nanotechnology: that nanorobots, for example, can create themselves, will be painless penetrate the human body, run through the blood vessels, heal diseases, darn blood vessels, remove plaques, and eventually replace natural processes, and then the so-called ‘grey mucus’ will finally displace man from the natural world. Society was shocked by such futurological insights. The greens-minded even had thoughts of banning nanoparticles and nanotechnology.
For the first ten years, there was really a lot of interest in new research. But, since nothing terrible happened, people have cooled down to this topic. But the interest of the researchers themselves is only expanding. A detailed study of the properties of nanoparticles and ways to control these properties is underway. For example, it was found that if the size of nanoparticles of some iron oxides is less than the size of the magnetic domain, then they can exhibit the effect of superparamagnetism, which allows them to be quickly separated from the solution by the action of a permanent magnet. This effect can be used both for concentrating nanoimpurities and for purifying water from pollutants.
Everyone knows what doping is. Once sports doping devices were not detected, but these samples are still stored. And now, starting with the 2008 Olympics in Athens and the 2012 Olympics in London, it becomes possible to detect doping using modern methods. In pharmacology, the revealed biochemical effects make it possible to obtain a more accurate and deep understanding of the physiological effect of drugs on humans: how they accumulate in the body, what they turn into.
Nanoscience studies the effects inherent in nanoobjects, and nanotechnology – the creation and use of substances in which these effects are manifested. In particular, the production of quantum dots of semiconductors, carbon, magnetic nanoparticles and nanoparticles of any other substances with unique properties – with the transfer of energy or charge, with magnetization, with the glow effect. All this can then be used for diagnostics in medicine, and for creating nanocomputers or means of converting solar energy in electronics.
We are just dealing with the problem of impurity concentration. It boils down to learning to detect less and less concentration of substances: for example, one atom per hundred million atoms of nanoparticles – after all, it is he who can distort the physical properties of a substance. There are already methods that allow one to determine one atom, one molecule – this is the limit of sensitivity in chemistry. Our task is to concentrate these supermicroimpurities, study their properties and reveal them in individual nanoparticles, in order to then create conditions for standardizing the production of nanoparticles.
We are trying to apply the revealed effects to determine, for example, antibiotics in the blood of animals. They are produced by our Nita-Pharm company. Its specialists are interested in knowing how long an antibiotic lives and works, what is the dynamics of its transformation in the body of animals and poultry. To solve this problem, we use magnetic nanoparticles, which we cover with special polymer molecules with positive and negative charges, which allow the adsorption of oppositely charged antibiotics, or antioxidants (rutin, quercetin), or food and other synthetic colouring matters.
Nanoparticles can be used with great success for the purification of waste water from heavy metals. If there are drains with heavy metals from a certain enterprise, it is possible to obtain magnetic nanosorbents in a special reservoir, which will concentrate them, then collect them with a magnet and use, for example, in building materials or dispose of them. Such nanomaterials are often referred to as nanoplatforms.
There are nanoplatforms for drug delivery. There are others – for the concentration and removal of not only heavy metals, but also any organic toxic compounds. In the same way, that is, with a magnet, it is possible to collect even oil spilled in water, which will be sorbed on the surface of magnetic nanoparticles. The problem is that we do all this in laboratory conditions, in small volumes, and technologists need to create devices capable of working with large volumes of substances, maybe even in a flow-through version.
You can list many more effects that can be applied in different directions: in electronics, medicine, biochemistry, to assess the dynamics of plant development, transformations in living cells. In the future, the possibilities of using nanoplatforms are practically unlimited.
But to do nanoscience, you need funds. Since 1993, as soon as the Russian Foundation for Basic Research joined this area of research, we received 23 small grants (8 of them research), in which I was the leader. We have now received a large grant from the Russian Science Foundation. Our grant is called the Multifunctional Nanoplatforms as a Tool for Concentration and Determination of Biologically Active Substances.
With these funds, we are going to purchase a luminescent device. The plans for the next year include a spectrophotometer that can be used by all students. So far, only graduate students have such an opportunity, using the only Japanese spectrophotometer. In the future, we are going to purchase a drying oven for nanoparticles and other auxiliary equipment.
– Today, the implementation of global projects is mainly carried out by large scientific chemical centres. Where is the place of university chemistry? What tasks can it solve?
– The university creates unique opportunities for a universal approach to solving scientific problems, for consolidating the efforts of physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists – everyone involved in the study of matter. At one time, colleagues from the Department of Semiconductor Physics came to us, offered to cooperate, said, you, chemists, know how to work with matter, and we know how to work with devices, create them. As a result of such cooperation, a large number of publications appeared, as well as the defence of candidate and doctoral dissertations. An example of such consolidation was the scientific group of one of my students, Professor Dmitrii Gorin, which included chemists, biologists, physicians, and physicists. They tackled the problem of encapsulation for drug delivery. Today he continues to do this in Skolkovo. Now Professor Irina Goryacheva’s scientific group is working very actively in this direction, which interacts with colleagues from Germany and Belgium. This approach allows the university to move forward very effectively with little funds.
– During your overseas business trips, you have lectured at various universities around the world. Does this mean that we also have some priorities in the field of chemistry? What are they interested in?
– The work of our department is devoted to analytical chemistry. We were pioneers as early as 1976 when we started working on micellar solutions, which are formed from surfactant molecules. We were the first, ahead of the Japanese, Americans and Germans, to write a book on this topic. Professor Rimma Chernova, who recently passed away, prepared about two dozen graduate students on this topic, including me. In turn, I have already prepared 21 candidates and 8 doctors of science and I am very proud of them. My outstanding students are: Dmitrii Gorin who works at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Irina Goryacheva is one of our best analytical chemists in immune analysis using nanoparticles. And Tatyana Rusanova is now chairing our department.
As far as the application of our systems is concerned, an almost anecdotal fact can be cited. In 1976, when we began to study the reactions in micelles formed in water, it never occurred to us that this water would be called micellar and would be sold, although the principle of its action was clear: micelles dissolve substances that are poorly soluble in water. All this happened now, that is, almost 40 years later.
How did my own research start? After defending my doctoral dissertation in 1990, for the first time in 1993, I had the opportunity to make a long hour-long report at the Science Council on Analytical Chemistry (SCAC RAS), in which I outlined the problems associated with the use of so-called “organized media”, including micelles, microemulsions and cyclodextrins in chemical analysis. Then, at the suggestion of Academician Myasoedov, I was included in the Department of Analytical Chemistry of the organization uniting chemists from all over the world – in the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). After that, in 1996, I made a presentation in Saratov at the Russian-Japanese symposium, in 1998 – at the University of Tokyo, and in 1999 I was invited as a research professor at the University of Okayama in Japan.
For four months I worked in Japan, gave lectures in English, which I had to learn at high speed. After that, they began to invite me to the universities of Denmark, Germany, Sweden. In 2005, Academician Yurii Zolotov, the head of analytical chemistry in Russia, nominated me as a representative of the Russian Chemical Society (whose presidium I am a member of) in the European Chemical Society. I began to speak regularly at European congresses in Austria, Serbia, Czech Republic, Poland, France, Spain, Turkey, and Greece. In 2017, I was offered to head a working group called the Nanoanalytics, the concept of which I formulated as “a field of analytical chemistry that develops principles and methods of application in the analysis of nanotechnology and special properties of a substance in a nanoscale state”. Last year, due to the COVID-19, a trip to Portugal did not take place, but this year I should go to the Netherlands. A fact of recognition of the importance of research was the award in 2014 by the President of Russia of the Honoured Scientist of the Russian Federation titled.
I presented the developed concept in a new textbook for students on analytical chemistry, published at MIREA – Russian Technological University in the publishing house titled FIZMATLIT. It was published in 2019-20, in the third volume I have a chapter on Nanoanalytics. In 2015 and 2018, I edited two monographs, respectively the Nanoobjects and Nanotechnologies in Chemical Analysis in the Science publishing house and the Nanoanalytics: Nanoobjects and Nanotechnologies in Analytical Chemistry in De Gruyter in Germany. There is an order from the European Chemical Society for writing a textbook, there is an order for a special issue of the Analytical Bioanalytical Chemistry the journal. Alas, there is not enough time for everything – nanoscience is developing so rapidly today that you need to try very hard to keep up with colleagues.
Text by: Tamara Korneva
Photos by: Victoria Viktorova
In the photo: Seminar on nanochemistry and nanotechnologies conducted for the first-ear master degree students. They are showing how a magnet nanoplatform works.
