Paper accepted: “Synthesis, characterization and biological activities of biopolymeric Schiff bases prepared with chitosan and salicylaldehydes and their Pd(II) and Pt(II) complexes”

Today, Hellen Barbosa’s and Maha Attjioui’s and their co-authors’ paper on salicylaldehyde derivatives of chitosan and their complexes with palladium and platinum has been accepted for publication in a special issue of the journal “Molecules” devoted to chitosan derivatives and their applications. Hellen had prepared and characterised these derivatives in her home University of São Paulo in Brazil. With a sandwich doctoral fellowship of CAPES, she then came to us to analyse their biological activities. Maha had just successfully finished her PhD and took over the responsibility to introduce Hellen to our different bioassays. They studied the antimicrobial activities of the compounds against a bacterium and a fungus and found significant differences, hinting at different modes of antimicrobial action against these two classes of micro-organisms. They also studied possible cytotoxicity of the compounds and found activities against breast cancer cells, warranting further studies to investigate this activity in more detail. This has probably been the fastest acceptance of a manuscript for publication I ever encountered - proof of the excellent interdisciplinary and international collaboration between Hellen and Maha. And a second manuscript is already in preparation.