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Palli Thordarson Profile picture
Palli Thordarson
@PalliThordarson
Professor and Director of the UNSW RNA Institute, School of Chemistry, UNSW, President of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI).
Dec 23, 2020 • 24 tweets • 8 min read
Radio silence for 1 hour, binge-watching cartoons for over an hour and other #Christmas memories from my childhood – a thread to the past in Iceland and Christmas there in the countriside #isolation in the 1970’s where Radio and TV played a key role. I grew up on a farm just outside the village of Vopnafjörður northeast-Iceland. The village with ca 600 people is surrounded by a few farms like ours but the next living soul is more than 40 km away! It is one of the most isolated places in Iceland (8 hours from Reykjavik).
Nov 11, 2020 • 37 tweets • 12 min read
How are mRNA vaccines made? A chemist’s perspective. TL;DR A DNA plasmid is used as template for the in vitro transcription of DNA to mRNA which is then packaged in a lipid nanoparticle. But it is a bit complicated than that. (image @AFox_Perth theconversation.com/australia-may-… ) 1/35 I am chemist with a life-long interest in viruses and self-assembly, working in the nanomedicine @ARCCoEBionano field for over 10 years. More recently, our group has been synthesising short RNA (unpublished work) with my colleague #ozchem @Fahrenbachus @UNSWScience 2/35
Jun 6, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
1/5 The "Cult" problem in some corners of chemistry has been highlighted "that" @angew_chem paper. The most infuriating was the non-scientific drivel about #diversity being somehow problematic. WRONG! The science proofs the value of diversity as per 2/5 But I want to also highlight the scary "submission to master" view of supervision in that paper. This approach yields poor training, bad science and destroys people! N.b this attitude to supervision is still out there. Sometimes it is somewhat hidden in the form of a "cult".
Apr 30, 2020 • 22 tweets • 9 min read
1/21 Why would UV light be a really bad method for destroying the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing #COVID19 in your body or on your skin while it is a good method for disinfecting surfaces? TL;DR It destroys the viruses RNA. But also your DNA, which may lead to cancer. Image 2/21 I am a Chemistry Professor and I work in nanomedicine @UNSWScience @NanoMed_UNSW @ARCCoEBionano making amongst other things, self-assembled virus-like particles for cancer treatment. In my field, some "smart" particles can be triggered with light. cbns.org.au/photoswitchabl…
Mar 11, 2020 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
1/9 It looks like my "soap" tweet has been quoted all over the place. Wonderful! I do though take a slight issue with the tone in some of these when it comes to soap vs hand sanitiser. Just because I said, soap is better, doesn't mean sanitiser are not good-they are very good! Image 2/9 Let's recap: Soap dissolves the virus by breaking up the interactions that hold it together. The alcohol in sanitisers and wipes does pretty much the same: "Hence alcohol does also dissolve the lipid membrane and disrupts other supramolecular interactions in the virus"
Mar 9, 2020 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
1/18 A soap is a soap is a soap! I am still flabbergasted by your response to my Twitter thread about the #COVID19 Coronavirus, soap and supramolecular chemistry! I have been quite busy today but I in this thread I will try to provide answers to some of your questions: 2/18 A lot of the questions are basically about which soap is best? Some people ask if detergents are better/worse than soap? Let me start with the latter one. Basically, what people call a detergent and what is a soap seems to differ! To me as a chemists they are very similar.
Mar 8, 2020 • 41 tweets • 9 min read
1/25 Part 1 - Why does soap work so well on the SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus and indeed most viruses? Because it is a self-assembled nanoparticle in which the weakest link is the lipid (fatty) bilayer. A two part thread about soap, viruses and supramolecular chemistry #COVID19 2/25 The soap dissolves the fat membrane and the virus falls apart like a house of cards and "dies", or rather, we should say it becomes inactive as viruses aren’t really alive. Viruses can be active outside the body for hours, even days.
Mar 4, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
#covid19 infected per capita yesterday. In just a few days my country of birth Iceland went from 0 cases to 14, putting it on par with Italy. Most of these cases came indeed from one group on a ski-ing trip in Italy. Goes to show how quickly things can change with this outbreak. Image N.b. The heading is in Icelandic and translated is roughly "Covid-19 infected people per million inhabitants"