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Led by dr. Janez Štrancar, PhD, the researchers of the Biophysics Laboratory of the Condensed Matter Physics Department at the “Jožef Stefan” Institute have made crucial contributions to a large study of the mechanisms for nanomaterial toxicity and inflammation predictions without the use of test animals, published in the Advanced Materials under the title Prediction of Chronic Inflammation for Inhaled Particles: the Impact of Material Cycling and Quarantining in the Lung Epithelium. As part of the SmartNanoTox Horizon 2020 Projects, the Biophysics Laboratory coordinated the work of 34 authors from 9 countries. The authors of the article are the first to identify the key molecular events involved and connect them into a complicated cyclic mechanism that triggers different inflammatory responses. This knowledge allowed them to develop a model for predicting chronic inflammations using only selected cell tests. These findings are already being used to develop autonomous detection systems to predict the safety of materials, chemicals, medications or vaccines.

1. Roman Šink, Ema Valentina Brovč, Stane Pajk, Janez Mravljak, Stabilization of pharmaceutical compositions comprising polysorbate, EP3714902 (A1), European Patent Office, 30. 09. 2020.

1. Luka Drinovec, Griša Močnik, Photo‐thermal interferometer, EP3492905 (B1), European Patent Office, 29. 04. 2020; US10768088 (B2), US Patent Office, 8. 09. 2020.

As the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a general lack of medical protective equipment, the researchers from “Jožef Stefan” Institute, including associates of our department, decided to look into the option of using ionizing radiation to sterilize used masks and allow their reuse. The results showed that facepiece respirators type FFP2 and FFP3 can be sterilized by Gamma irradiation and electron beam irradiation. This method of sterilization preserves the mechanical and chemical characteristics of masks and does not harm the efficiency of aerosol particle filtration. While 20 kGy radiation does cause the loss of the polypropylene membrane filters static charge, re-application of the charge brings the filtration efficiency back to the previous level. Masks can be sterilized up to two times using this method. The research was carried out by Luka Pirker, Anja Pogačnik Krajnc, Anton Gradišek, Andreja Jelen, Maja Remškar, Igor B. Mekjavić, Janez Kovač, Miran Mozetič, Luka Snoj, Jan Malec and Vladimir Radulović, and the results were published in the Journal of Membrane Science in the article entitled Sterilization of polypropylene membranes of facepiece respirators by ionizing radiation.

Abdou Hassanien from the F5 Department of Jozef Stefan Institute has published, in collaboration with Biao Zhou and Akiko Kobayashi from Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan, an article in the Journal of Advanced Electronic Materials titled Spontaneous Antiferromagnetic Ordering in a Single Layer of (BETS)2GaCl4 Organic Superconductor. The fabrication of such well-defined and atomically clean interfaces between materials of different orders are of fundamental interest to engineer novel functionalities and to study emergent phenomena in condensed matter physics. The paper illustrates the interplay between electronic orders of hybrid mix of nested antiferromagnetic molecular chains and superconducting molecular stripes at the single layer limit. Results of low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy have shown that low level vibronic and magnetic excitations that dominate the higher temperature phase are absent below Tc which point to their cooperative existence and possible renormalization to mediate superconductivity in such d-wave superconductors.