Magdalena Almén

Directed self-assembly offers an excellent route for the fabrication of nano-structured materials over large length scales. The final structure is determined by the interaction between the different building blocks, which can be, for example, steric, Coulomb or hydrophobic. From magnetic nano-particles the magnetic induction provides an additional design opportunity, with the particular advantage that the […]

Surfactants are amphiphilic molecules, meaning that one part is hydrophobic and the other hydrophilic. This leads to that they adsorb at interfaces and self-assembles in solution into various structures. These properties make surfactants important ingredients in several products as eg. detergents, emulsifiers and rheological modifiers. The extensive use of surfactants results in a significant environmental […]

Lipid based Nanoparticles (LNPs) constitute a potent nanotechnology used in drug and gene delivery. Indeed, the Covid19 vaccines by Pziffer and Moderna use this technology. LNP efficiency, however, is low (as determined by the protein expression capacity per loaded RNA) and efforts are continuously being made to increase their potency. For example, improving the uptake […]

Carbon materials are used in a wide range of applications from gas filtration to energy storage in batteries and supercapacitors. Optimization and control of carbon structures, e.g. level of graphitization, is vital for achieving peak performance of these materials for a specific application. Thus far, the structure of carbon materials was primarily determined by the […]

The reorientational dynamics can be linked to the occurrence of many interesting properties, e.g.  high ionic conductivities in M2BnHn and MCBn-1Hn (M = Li, Na; n = 10, 12). While most studies on reorientational dynamics have focused on compounds that contain one active species, new systems with interesting properties which exhibit dynamics on similar timescales […]

Since the invention of the transistor and the photovoltaic cell, it has been clear that an understanding of emergent electronic and magnetic phenomena is of greatest importance for the development of modern society and sustainability. The low temperature properties of Ho2Ti2O7 has pusseled scientists for over two decades. The degenerate ground state of this material […]

Plastic waste receives a lot of bad publicity but for some applications there are advantages for synthetic polymers over use of other materials.  Recycling is often readily practicable if the component materials are known, and so the balance of benefits and end-use costs needs to be carefully evaluated.  A recent study [1] came about from […]

In order to rationally design new smart materials, it is pivotal to understand their phase behaviour. This means being able to predict under which conditions (e.g. temperature, pressure, concentration) such a material is a fluid, a disordered solid, or a crystal. Colloidal dispersions are suitable model systems to reproduce the behaviour of atomic systems and […]

We all have heard about the good and bad cholesterol and how these are affected by diet. Good cholesterol or high density lipoprotein (HDL) removes lipids from the vessels to get excreted in the liver. Bad cholesterol or low density lipoprotein (LDL) deliver lipids to the body. The truth is that both good and bad […]

While society strives towards more sustainable lifestyles, technological applications and products that use green solvents are coming up slowly. Deep eutectic solvents (DES) are the epitome of green neoteric solvents. They can be synthesised using simple and cheap organic precursors (e.g. polyols, carboxylic acids, amino acids…), where the mixture of two solid compounds at the […]

Bone has remarkable mechanical properties resulting in a unique ability to withstand mechanical loading. It is a hierarchically structured composite material made up primarily of type-I collagen and hydroxyapatite (HAp) mineral. The combination of these constituents and their complex structural organisation, from the molecular level to the whole organ, result in a tissue with an […]

Polymers show very interesting viscoelastic properties. They can be elastic, bridle or rigid as solids or show flow properties very similar to those of liquids, which allows Taylor design of materials with unique mechanical properties. This fact is related to the wide range of relaxation times relevant for the local dynamics of the polymer chains. […]

Hydrogen and compounds containing hydrogen are among the most frequently studied objects in neutron scattering. It is therefore important that the n-p scattering process is understood in detail for a correct interpretation of experimental data. The very high value for the bound proton cross section (σ = 81.9 barns) is caused by a specific feature […]

Liposomes are vesicles comprising a lipid membrane and aqueous core, and have found myriad applications in the biomedical field as therapeutics and in diagnostic assays. Liposome design requires careful choice of lipid composition and formulation method in order to produce populations with a defined unilamellar membrane structure. This is crucial in the development of liposome […]

As a result of decades of misuse of antibiotics, the number of bacteria resistant to commercially available antibiotics is increasing worldwide and is one of the major challenges facing global health. A unique drug-delivery system has been tested in vitro to understand its effect on bacteria. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are host defense peptides present as […]

Histatin 5 is an intrinsically disordered, multifunctional, cationic, saliva protein known to act as the first line of defense against oral candidiasis caused by Candida albicans and belongs to the family of antimicrobial peptides. The mechanism at the base of its antifungal activity is still partially unknown. For this reason, understanding the interaction between Histatin […]

Understanding the surface rheological behavior of adsorbed films at the aqueous/air interface composed of sugars, surfactants, or complexes between them, is of great interest due to their relevance in different application areas ranging from food, medical diagnostics and oil recovery. Recently, we have found that α-cyclodextrin (α-CD)/anionic surfactant mixtures form films at the solution/air interface […]

Materials databases, high throughput computing, and data mining has emerged as powerful tools for screening and rapid prototyping of functional materials. Quantum magnetic systems, with often competing ground states and phases, are a challenge for ab initio modelling. In recent work at Nordita and KTH an important step forward was taken for predictive modeling of […]

Diffraction from protein crystals remains the central pathway to high-quality protein structure determination, but a universal approach to crystallization has not been presented. This lack is linked to the underlying fundamental complexity of protein crystallization: proteins are nonspherical, flexible macromolecules with highly anisotropic interactions. Anisotropic sticky attraction can induce amorphous aggregation, and a better understanding […]

Proton-conducting oxides are materials of huge interest for a variety of applications, such as electrolytes in membrane reactors or in proton-conducting fuel cells (PCFC) operating in the intermediate temperature range, T = 200 – 500°C. A limiting factor pertaining to the performance of present-day PCFC devices is a too low proton conductivity of the electrolyte […]

The great advantage of using neutron scattering within the Life Sciences is not only the greater sensitivity towards hydrogen as compared to using X-rays as probe instead, but more importantly the ability to distinguish hydrogen from its heavier isotope deuterium.  This property enables highlighting different parts within a molecule or a molecular complex, and has […]

Nonlamellar lipid liquid crystalline phases have many potential applications, such as for drug delivery, protein encapsulation or crystallization. Lipid liquid crystalline sponge phase (L3) has so far not been very much considered in these applications, in spite of apparent advantages in terms of its flexibility and capacity of forming large aqueous pores able to encapsulate […]

Cellulose nanomaterials extracted from plants are very attractive due to their intrinsic optical and mechanical properties (e.g., high transparency, large elastic modulus, etc) and the potential novel applications that exploit these features. However, despite the extraordinary intrinsic properties of nanocelluloses at the nanoscopic level, the translation of the properties to the macroscopic level is not […]