Oral desensitization in IgE-mediated food allergy: Effectiveness and safety.

The avoidance of allergenic foods and emergency medications on accidental exposure are the only currently approved treatments in food allergy. EAACI guideline on allergen immunotherapy recommends oral immunotherapy as a therapeutic option to increase the threshold of the reaction during treatment in children with persistent IgE-mediated cow's milk, hen's egg, and peanut allergy from around 4-5 years of age, but the same recommendation cannot currently be made to achieve post-discontinuation effectiveness. Both systemic and local reactions during OIT have been frequently reported. For this reason, EAACI guideline suggests several recommendations on safety, including carefully monitoring patients for allergic reactions, especially during the up-dosing phase of OIT, and monitoring for symptoms of new-onset eosinophilic esophagitis. New approaches are certainly necessary to give priority not only to effectiveness but also to safety.

Evaluating Adsorbate-Solvent Interactions: Are Dispersion Corrections Necessary?

Incorporating solvent-adsorbate interactions is paramount in models of aqueous (electro)catalytic reactions. Although a number of techniques exist, they are either highly demanding in computational terms or inaccurate. Microsolvation offers a trade-off between accuracy and computational expenses. Here, we dissect a method to swiftly outline the first solvation shell of species adsorbed on transition-metal surfaces and assess their corresponding solvation energy. Interestingly, dispersion corrections are generally not needed in the model, but caution is to be exercised when water-water and water-adsorbate interactions are of similar magnitude.

A general but still unknown characteristic of active oxygen evolution electrocatalysts.

The unsatisfactory electrocatalysis of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is a major hurdle for the sustainable production of hydrogen using water electrolyzers. Besides, most state-of-the-art catalysts are based on expensive and scant elements such as Ru and Ir. Hence, it is paramount to establish the features of active OER catalysts to make well-informed searches. Here, an affordable statistical analysis exposes a general yet unnoticed characteristic of active materials for the OER: they frequently have three out of four electrochemical steps with free energies above 1.23 eV. For such catalysts, the first three steps (abbreviated as: H2O → *OH, *OH → *O, *O → *OOH) are statistically prone to be over 1.23 eV, and the second step is often potential limiting. Finally, "electrochemical symmetry", a recently introduced concept, is shown to be a simple and convenient criterion for the in silico design of enhanced OER catalysts, as materials with three steps over 1.23 eV tend to be highly symmetric.

Extracting Features of Active Transition Metal Electrodes for NO Electroreduction with Catalytic Matrices.

Electrocatalytic reduction of oxidized nitrogen compounds (NOx) promises to help rebalance the nitrogen cycle. It is widely accepted that nitrate reduction to NH4+/NH3 involves NO as an intermediate, and NO hydrogenation is the potential-limiting step of NO reduction. Whether *NO hydrogenates to *NHO or *NOH is still a matter of debate, which makes it difficult to optimize catalysts for NOx electroreduction. Here, "catalytic matrices" are used to swiftly extract features of active transition metal catalysts for NO electroreduction. The matrices show that active catalysts statistically stabilize *NHO over *NOH and have undercoordinated sites. Besides, square-symmetry active sites with Cu and other elements may prove active for NO electroreduction. Finally, multivariate regressions are able to reproduce the main features found by the matrices, which opens the door for more sophisticated machine-learning studies. In sum, catalytic matrices may ease the analysis of complex electrocatalytic reactions on multifaceted materials.