Humify – superfood for the soil

Fighting climate change with green chemistry: The start-up Humify has developed a technology that can reactivate soil as a carbon sink

05-Aug-2025 - Hot and humid temperatures, no light, no air and then that intense odour: when the high-pressure cooker is fired up in the start-up Humify's laboratory, it is hard to imagine that under such conditions the resulting product – a kind of black liquid sludge – could help to influence climate change ...

Green Chemistry Meets Microbiome Research for Soil Regeneration

14-Apr-2025 - With a prestigious Max Planck Fellowship (2025–2028), microbiologist Gabriele Berg from the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy (ATB) is launching a research collaboration with chemist Markus Antonietti at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces. Together, ...

Artificial Photosynthesis Decoded

How Carbon Nitride Splits Water (and Enables Green Hydrogen)

27-Jan-2025 - Scientists have long sought to understand the exact mechanism behind water splitting by carbon nitride catalysts. For the first time, Dr. Paolo Giusto and his team captured the step-by-step interactions at the interface between carbon nitride and water, detailing the transfer of protons and ...

New Discovery: Toward sugar origami

Folded carbohydrates could open up completely new perspectives in biomedicine and materials science

06-Jul-2023 - Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPICI) have designed a carbohydrate sequence capable of folding into a stable secondary structure. Until now, such self-folding biopolymers had only been developed for DNA and proteins, and sugars were previously considered too ...

Battery research - First online database on photocharged materials developed

Data was extracted from scientific articles published in the past 40 years and now is available in the form of interactive graphs online

31-Oct-2022 - Dr. Aleksandr Savateev, group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, has developed a unique online database. To do so, he has analyzed and standardized research data from 300 papers published over the past forty years in the field of photocharged semiconductors. The ...

Natural super glue from mistletoe berries

A promising discovery

21-Jun-2022 - A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPICI) and McGill University in Canada discovered strong adhesive properties of white-berry mistletoe. The mistletoe berry's flexible fibers adhere to both skin and cartilage as well as to various synthetic materials ...

Green Chemistry: Sustainable p-xylene production

Green, sustainable and biodegradable polymers

18-Sep-2020 - Lemonade, juice and mineral water often come in PET bottles. While these are practical and functional, their production is complex and not necessarily sustainable. The starting material for terephthalic acid, which is used to produce saturated polyesters such as PET (Polyethylene terephthalate), ...

Largest Synthetic Polysaccharide Assembled

Linear 100-mer polysaccharide within 188 hours

05-May-2020 - Chemists at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (Potsdam, Germany) have set a milestone by preparing the two largest carbohydrates ever assembled. Using an Automated Glycan Assembly (AGA) instrument originally developed at the institute they prepared a linear 100-mer and achieved ...

Stiff fibres spun from slime

Nanoparticles from the secretion of velvet worms form polymer fibres that can be recycled in water

18-Oct-2017 - Nature is an excellent teacher – even for material scientists. Researchers, including scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, have now observed a remarkable mechanism by which polymer materials are formed. In order to capture prey, velvet worms shoot out a sticky ...

Peter Seeberger is awarded the Roy L. Whistler Award 2012

11-Aug-2011 - The Roy L. Whistler Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry 2012 is awarded to Peter Seeberger, disclosed the International Carbohydrate Organization. Peter Seeberger is a professor at the Institute of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Freie Universität Berlin, and is also the Director at the Max Planck ...