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Nowadays it is increasingly important from a pharmacological, toxicological, and clinical point of view to have rapid and reliable screening tests available for the analysis of numerous compounds in very short time. Often these procedures involve innovative and eco–friendly extraction and purification techniques, but it is necessary to apply preliminary steps such as the protein precipitation (plasma or whole blood) or enzymatic hydrolysis, to obtain a quantitative dosage also of the metabolites (urine). In this work a rapid screening procedure in liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS) for the qualitative evaluation of 739 compounds in biological samples (blood, post–mortem blood, and urine) has been reported. The method also considers the deuterated internal standards (d9–methadone and d3–monohydroxycarbazepine) to monitor the performances of the screening (check of the fragmentation process and retention times). The procedure involves two separate analyses in positive and negative ionization and a chromatographic run of 18 min, without modifying the instrumental parameters (except the ionization polarity of the turbospray source). The chromatographic separation was carried out using a Restek Allure PFP Propyl (5 µm, 60Å, 50 × 2.1 mm) column in gradient elution mode. The instrument works in Multiple Reaction Monitoring (MRM) mode on 697 specific transitions for the compounds subject to screening. Furthermore, real samples (human blood and urine) were analyzed to confirm the correct performance of the screening.

Biofilm at water-oil interface of hypoxic water columns of microcosms, prepared from a lacustrine sample, that used diesel as a carbon source was found to show electrogenic properties. These microcosms named, Liquid Microbial Fuel Cells (L-MFCs) were electrically characterized using a custom electronic analyzer; accurate determination of voltage (V), power density (W/m 2), and current density (A/m2) for both charge and discharge phases was carried out. The instrument made it possible to carry out cell characterizations using resistive loads between 0 Ω (Ohm) and 10 kΩ. During the hypoxic and electrogenic phase, the synthesis of a system of "bacterial piping induction", produced filaments of hundreds of micrometers in which the microbial cells are hosted. Ultrastructural microscopy collected by scanning (SEM), transmission (TEM), immunofluorescence, Thunder Imager 3D, confocal laser scanning (CLSM) microscopy revealed a "myelin like" structure during filamentation processes; this "myelin like" structure exhibited cross-reactivity towards different epitopes of the myelin basic protein (MBP) and Claudin 11 (O4) of human oligodendrocytes. The disclosure of these filamentation processes could be helpful to describe further unconventional microbial structures in aquatic ecosystems and of the animal world. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/7d35tj3j96/1., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests or personal relationships which have or could be perceived to have influenced the work reported in this article., (© 2022 Istituto Superiore di Sanità.)

Narcotic and psychotropic substances are natural, synthetic, or semisynthetic compounds that are present in both solid and liquid illicit products. The alterations effects on the central nervous system related to their use can be psycholeptic, psychoanaleptic, or psychodiseptic and are able to generate tolerance, addiction, or dependence phenomena, creating social and public order problems. In this scenario, the analytical evaluations that aim to determine these analytes in seized nonbiological samples, and which assume the character of judicial evidence, must meet high analytical requirements of reliability, transparency, and procedures uniformity at a national level. For the first time in the literature, the herein validated method is able to provide the simultaneous quantitative determination of 37 of the most common narcotic substances as well as the most commonly used excipients/adulterants found in seized illicit material. Additionally, the validated method can process both solid and liquid samples maintaining the precision and trueness levels (intraday and interday) in accordance with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency international guidelines (<14.31 and <13.41%, respectively). Furthermore, it provides a simple and fast procedure for sample preparation using the dilute and shoot approach, exploiting the sensitivity and selectivity of the LC-MS/MS instrument configuration used and the signal acquisition in multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode (both positive and negative polarization modes).