Newly Discovered Compound Quickly Disables Chemical Weapons

One of the most difficult problems, of the many, of dealing with chemical weapons is what to do when you’ve actually taken some from a hostile government who’s willing to use them. As we saw with the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, those who have chemical weapons and are in dire straits are going to use them to turn the the tables in their favor. It’s usually only due to international pressure that these weapons get put down and taken away. However once they’re taken away, you still run into problems; namely that these weapons are still active and deadly and, sometimes, unstable. So how can you make sure they’re disarmed in a safe and quick manner?

The usual methods of disarming aren’t the worst, but they have a huge issue. Heat and humidity can quickly breakdown the enzymes used to disable chemical weapons, leaving the usual methods inert and useless. When the international community took Assad’s weapons away from him, they ran into this very problem. However this also led to a burst of activity looking for a solution and now one has been found. Two chemists from Northwestern University, Omar Farha and Joseph Hupp, have been able to create a compound that can safely and quickly disarm chemical weapons without falling prey to the heat and humidity that older solutions would. They drew inspiration from bacteria which create phosphotriesterase, an enzyme that can deactivate certain pesticides and chemical weapons related to those in milliseconds. However since phosphotriesterase is easily disrupted, they had to create a manmade catalyst that could survive extreme (or not so much) conditions that would render phosphotriesterase otherwise useless.

Using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), a class of porous compounds, the two researchers began to construct their manmade catalyst. Phosphotriesterase has two zinc atoms that bind with the nerve agent and induce hydrolysis, deactivating any chemical bonds. By replacing the zinc with zirconium (amongst a number of other complicated scientific procedures), the scientists were able to create a stable MOF that can be used to deactivate weapons at speeds much faster than previous attempts. While there is still a lot of work to be done so that this compound can be used in the world, the fact that it disabled half of a similar-to-nerve-agents pesticide in only 15 minutes means that they’re on the right track.

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