Lisa McElwee-White is in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida, and works on applications of organometallic chemistry to problems in materials science, catalysis and synthetic methodology.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

My mother gave me science toys and took me to museum classes because she was frustrated that she couldn't become a scientist. I loved playing with a chemistry set (completely unsupervised!) in the basement of my parents' house. Once I got the chance to do undergraduate research at the beginning of my freshman year, I was hooked. I never considered majoring in anything else.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

I'd love to play in a major symphony orchestra but my skill level as a musician isn't anywhere near that high. I'll just have to keep my day job as a chemistry professor.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

We are working on several things: green chemistry methods for carbonylation, electrocatalysts for direct oxidation of alcohols in fuel cells, and design and synthesis of organometallic precursors for the chemical vapour deposition of inorganic thin films. All of these are interesting and important problems but I think our most distinctive work at the moment is in mechanism based design of CVD precursors. I would like to see our approach spread through the materials community, so that people think more like chemists when looking at deposition chemistry.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Rosalind Franklin, because I'd like to hear the story from her side.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

I think it was in about 1987. I prepared a batch of (CO)5W(THF) as starting material for a student. I learned rapidly that my time as a faculty member was so fragmented that it was not possible to synthesize sensitive organometallic compounds and get the workup done before the material decomposed. My current generation of students can't even conceive of me doing an experiment. They cringe when I touch things.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

The book would be something by Terry Pratchett, probably Good Omens. The album would be a tougher choice. Half of me would want something baroque, maybe one of the Interpreti Veniziani recordings of Vivaldi. The other half of me couldn't give up my Springsteen albums so I might end up with my hands on Born to Run.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions – and why?

Paul Wender. I'm dying to find out if he can answer a question within the 100 word limit.

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in the height of summer, I found myself at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting held in Germany on the shores of lake Constance. I was there as part of a film crew sent by Nature Publishing Group to capture conversations between the young researchers and Nobel Laureates - much in the same way as the physics-themed meeting was covered last year. The first of the chemistry films goes live in a few days time, but to whet your appetite, here is a trailer:

For more details about the meeting, you can also read my report (freely available) from the September issue of Nature Chemistry - which went live yesterday. The latest edition of the ChemPod will also go live in the next few days and you can hear me chatting with Mark Peplow about the Lindau experience and my thoughts about a change in career...!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scott Mabury is in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, and primarily works on the environmental fate, distribution and persistence of fluorinated chemicals.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

Growing up on a farm combined with a Mom who taught Junior High science, a great high school chemistry teacher in Potosi, Missouri (Bill Nelson) and topped off with a course called "environmental chemistry" at college probably capture most of the 'what'.

2. If you weren't a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

Either a brain researcher or a farmer though I actually do the latter one day a week now. Probably best to keep the farming job as the one I play at since the rewards are mostly psychic ones. I find the science of the human brain fascinating and extremely challenging.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

A number of interesting things, although exploring why humans are so contaminated with perfluorinated acids is particularly intriguing. Specifically, we synthesize various polyfluorinated phosphates, that are commonly used as food contact paper chemicals to impart water and oil repellency, to explore their reactive properties. We just published some work that showed we could measure ppb concentrations of these in human serum, thus we are specifically interested in their metabolic reactions and whether they are significant contributors to the body burden of PFOA and related perfluorinated acids. This involves live-animal metabolism studies along with more focused investigations of the reactive intermediates.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Winston Churchill since I've taken on an additional job in university administration and successful leadership is on my mind.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

Probably not since my early years as an assistant professor though I love designing experiments. I do note we are doing a largish field experiment now on the fate of food contact paper chemicals in an agroecosystem. This has me riding my John Deere tractor disking 600 tons of paper sludge on to 20 acres, on my farm, and then planting it into soybeans. I have an undergrad research student who follows along obtaining and ultimately analyzing the samples. My experimental contributions are not so scientific but they are necessary to the experiment.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

Like publishing research, quality is more important than quantity but quantity still matters (especially on a desert island) so I would bring War and Peace. Harder pick for music so perhaps some Led Zeppelin would go well with Tolstoy.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions - and why?

Wow, this is harder than I would have thought as there are so many. Perhaps Mario Molina or Sherwood Rowland as they are scientific heroes of mine and I be interested seeing their personas fleshed out.

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've spent the majority of my time in the organic sessions here at the ACS meeting, and the standout highlights have to be the Young Academic Investigators on Monday and the Arthur C. Cope award scholars symposium yesterday. In the first of these I particularly enjoyed talks by Richmond Sarpong and Chris Vanderwal who both spoke on uses of pyridines in natural product synthesis - although from very different perspectives.

Richmond described synthetic efforts towards a number of heterocyclic products from a common bromomethoxypicoline; readers with a JACS subscription can read about it here. While the structure of the original pyridine is fairly well intact in Richmond's final products, this could not be further from the truth for Chris who spends his time ripping pyridine rings open using the Zincke reaction, more details here.

Moving on to the Cope scholars, Paul Chirik's description of what he calls Modern Alchemy - essentially looking at how to use cheaper and abundant metals for catalysis was very entertaining. Apparently, if you need to explain to your mother why an iron catalyst might be better than a platinum one, then tell her that 'the price of stamps (self-adhesive) would increase by 5% per year because of the cost of platinum which can't be recovered from the glue.' Other highlights included Bill Jones dancing around the stage explaining the precession of a coordinated rhodium species around an aromatic ring, and Erik Sorensen's description of the rapid construction of complex molecules such as the natural product (+)-FR182877

While looking up the last link, I couldn't help noticing that Erik published this work with none other than Chris Vanderwal, and it leads me to this final thought: How many of the presenters in the young investigators session will appear in the Cope award scholars symposium at later ACS meetings and which future young investigators are they currently training?

Steve

Stephen Davey (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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I’m not sure why, but the polymer sessions at ACS meetings always seem to be in venues away from the main conference centre. What do polymer chemists make of this, I wonder? Do they feel that they’re being hived off for some reason? Or do they actually quite like having a venue more or less to themselves? If there are any polymer people out there that would like to comment on this, I’d love to know.

A sense of direction was never my strongest point, and so it was that I got lost on the way to the hotel where the polymer talks were being held (which was embarrassing, because the hotel is just around the corner from the Washington Conference Center). Arriving with seconds to spare, I found that someone had seriously miscalculated the size of the room needed for the afternoon session. As the chairperson, Craig Hawker, commented, “This is the smallest lecture room Bob Grubbs will ever lecture in.” People were spilling out into the corridor, the air-con couldn’t cope, and frankly I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stick it out for long.

Fortunately, a swap was arranged with another session, providing us with a room three times the size of the original one, which we instantly filled. More chairs were brought in, but by the end of the afternoon it was still standing room only.

So why all the interest? Because it was a stellar line-up. Not just the aforementioned Bob Grubbs, but also Krysztof Matyjaszewski, Dave Bergbreiter and Karen Wooley, to name but a few. There was too much good stuff to cover here, but I liked Rachel O’Reilly’s work making metal-lined nanocages (Soft Matter subscribers can read about this here); Craig Hawker’s description of reactive polymers that have ketenes in their side-chains, which can be used for cross-linking or functionalization (the polymers can be used for microcontact printing applications); and Karen Wooley’s tour de force about nanoparticles that carry DNA plasmids into cells (Biomaterials subscribers can see some of this work here). Karen is currently using nanostructures as building blocks for complex molecular assemblies, for example by decorating anionic nanocylinders with cationic nanospheres; the anionic cylinders won’t enter cells, but they can do when coated with the cationic spheres. She’s ultimately hoping that her nanostructures will be useful for therapies targeting lung injuries.

I have to say that this was my favourite session of the meeting so far - the science was great, but there was also a genuine sense of camaraderie among the people in the room, with lots of interest in each talk demonstrated by the number of questions asked. Which made up for the fact that I got lost again on the way back to my hotel…

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

There’s so much good stuff going on at the ACS meeting that it’s tough finding time to blog, so here I am catching up on yesterday’s talks. Let’s kick off by talking about a brilliant session on inorganic nanochemistry. Zhong Lin Wang described his work with piezoelectric ZnO nanowires, especially looking at how they can be used to make nanogenerators for powering devices. One of the latest developments is a widget that produces an oscillating current as it flexes, effectively acting as an AC generator - Nature Nanotechnology subscribers can read a paper about this here. Zhong Lin wowed the audience by showing how such devices could be built into a jacket for a hamster; when the hamster went for a run in its wheel, the animal’s movement generated electricity! (Nano Letters subscribers can see this here.)

Equally impressive was Yi Cui's talk about the use of nanostructured surfaces for making efficient photovoltaic devices. By making solar cells lined with nanocones or nanodomes of silicon, the energy density of the cells reaches 17.5 mA per square centimetre - which according to Yi is “world-beating”. The silicon nanocones are better at trapping light than films of amorphous silicon, absorb light across a range of wavelengths (Yi showed data spanning 400 to 800 nanometres), and also efficiently absorb light that strikes the cell obliquely. I was particularly struck by pictures that compared amorphous silicon with the nanostructured stuff - amorphous silicon is grey, whereas the nanocone material is totally black, thus providing a simple demonstration of light absorption properties that even I could understand!

There was lots of other cool stuff (including a tantalizing mention from Yi about nanoribbon topological insulators that should solve a fundamental problem in spintronics, manuscript currently in press), but now I really want to say something about polymers (see my next blog entry)…

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Have you ever wondered how you would evacuate several thousand people from a hangar-sized conference centre in the event of a fire? Well, now I know, because all the fire alarms went off yesterday morning at the Washington Conference Center. I’m pleased to report that there was no mad panic (chemists, of all people, know how to respond to fire-related emergencies) but it has to be said that it does take a long time - the all-clear had been sounded before I made it to the exit. It turned out to be a false alarm, by the way.

I felt sorry for the poor speakers who were interrupted mid-flow by sirens and flashing lights, but an honourable mention must go to the presenter at the session that I was attending: Malika Jeffries-EL handled the interruption with magnificent aplomb. And everybody came back to see the rest of her talk - about the synthesis of benzobisazoles as building blocks for conjugated polymers - once the alarm was over.

Later in the same session, Tehshik Yoon spoke about his work on visible-light-driven photochemical reactions, specifically [2+2] cycloadditions. The key to using visible light for these reactions is the ruthenium catalyst; JACS subscribers can read about some of this work here, in a paper that describes intermolecular cycloadditions. Yoon has now tweaked the chemistry so that it works in crossed intermolecular reactions, and that work is currently in press.

I wonder if visible-light-driven reactions might become something of a theme for the future, as David MacMillan is, of course, also working in this field. He spoke about the development of his photoreactions for the asymmetric alkylation of aldehydes (Science subscribers can read the first paper on this topic here). The latest development in this story will undoubtedly be of interest to medicinal chemists: a method for the trifluoromethylation of aldehydes, which is currently in press.

News from today’s sessions later…

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's the first day of the ACS meeting in a bakingly hot Washington DC, so I decided to dip my toes into the cool waters of chemoinformatics. One of my favourite talks was by Jean-Claude Bradley, who provided an update on his work using open notebooks. Jean-Claude points out that one of the advantages of Open Data is the way that it allows quick validation of results - because there's no filtering of the data, then it's easy for anyone to scrutinize any unusual observations. What's more, if your data disagree with someone else's, then it's possible to work out what might have been done differently, potentially leading to useful new discoveries along the way.

I also quite liked his use of crowdsourcing as a way of amassing lots of data. He's currently interested in accumulating solubility data, so he's found some nice ways of getting people around the world to help provide it. For example, one undergraduate lab asks its students to generate solubility data as a practical assignment; the data is then passed on to Jean-Claude's group for his project. What better way to motivate students in their practical work than by giving them an assignment that generates useful new information?

So I came away from the session thinking anew about the whole Open Data concept. What do you think about it?

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So, here I am in Washington DC for the fall 2009 meeting of the ACS. This is my first time in DC, so I arrived a day early to fit some touristy activities into my schedule - first stop a photo of The White House from as close as I could get (which in case you didn't know is a long way away...).

I then went to see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights at the National Archives - and here's a chemistry fact for you - they're kept under pressurized helium. Now these are very important documents, and I'm not surprised to find that an inert atmosphere is used, but I did wonder about why helium was used instead of argon? Argon would probably be the synthetic chemist's choice for an inert gas, particularly as it's density makes it easier to work with, and as far as I know it's cheaper as well.

My final stop yesterday was the Smithsonian museum of American History. Being a bit of a science geek, I was surprised to find and immediately headed for the Science in American Life exhibit which is currently running - so if you have a gap in your schedule or, dare I say it, are sloping off from the sessions at the ACS, I can highly recommend it.

Steve

Stephen Davey (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stephen Davey at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

George Stanley is in the Department of Chemistry at Louisiana State University, and works on developing new homogeneous bimetallic catalysts and catalytic processes.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I became fascinated with science in the 4th grade (1962) when I read the Disney book Our Friend the Atom, followed by a large number of other science books in my small town's library. I got a chemistry set a year later and started playing around with standard "cook-book" reactions that progressed into preparing my own flash and smoke powder mixtures for fireworks. My school asked us every year what we wanted to be when we grew up and from 4th grade through 11th grade I said nuclear physicist. Taking calculus in my senior year in high school made me realize that I did not have the math abilities to be a physicist, so I "dropped down" to chemistry, which I was enjoying more and more.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

My first choice would be science teacher in a primary/secondary school setting. I am a gifted, enthusiastic teacher and have a broad love of science. I see a high fraction of students in primary and secondary schools here in the USA not getting good general science educations because their teachers do not have much appreciation or understanding of science. Unfortunately, there are very few hands-on science activities in most schools nor connections to everyday real life. If I had to get away from science or teaching, I would be interested in a business career. I have always been interested in business topics and have worked in a small-town pharmacy, a zinc refinery, and a steel mill. I have seen how poor management decisions have led to a company's decay and eventual closing (long before our current economic situation).

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

Our newest project is developing transition-metal catalysts for alkene hydration, which is the reaction of alkenes with water to produce linear alcohols or other oxygen-containing products. There are no examples of this for unactivated alkenes and Dr. James Roth, discoverer of the Monsanto Acetic Acid process, has called alkene hydration catalysis one of the 10 unsolved problems of industrial catalysis. We submitted a "blue-sky" (i.e., no preliminary results) proposal to Sasol North America and they took a big chance and funded this exploratory project. Although we are still in the early stages of studying this, we believe that we have indeed catalyzed a reaction between water and simple 1-alkenes under mild conditions. But the situation, naturally, turns out to be complicated with alkene oligomerization taking over to give a completely unexpected primary product.

As to where we would like to see this lead? A practical and environmentally friendly industrial catalyst would be fantastic. It is very rare, however, for academically discovered catalysts to make the transition to industrial commodity chemicals, so we are very realistic about this.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Tough question! Ben Franklin would be my choice (without a lot of deep thinking). I grew up in eastern PA and visited the Franklin Institute, a wonderful science museum in Philadelphia, many times as a kid. Ben Franklin was a remarkable person: scientist, politician, businessman, diplomat, and bon vivant. As a scientist I would like his insight into the politics that went on for the Declaration of Independence and thoughts on the constitution and the compromises involved, especially with regards to the second amendment ("right to bear arms") as it relates to the USA today.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

Last week! Although I don't do synthesis anymore, I do help out with our in situ catalyst spectroscopic studies (FT-IR & NMR) and when new autoclave runs are being done. I helped one graduate student condense and transfer butadiene to an autoclave for a hydroformylation run; another with setting up an ethylene hydroformylation experiment; and a senior student with a FT-IR study using a new silicon crystal attenuated total reflectance reaction cell. At US$660 per crystal, I usually mount and dismount the crystal in the cell for reaction studies and cleaning.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

Book: either The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 by William Manchester or the Boy Scout Manual. The Boy Scout Manual if survival looked difficult, otherwise the Glory and the Dream as a thick and engaging history of the USA during some remarkable times.

Music: Hmmm - batteries wouldn't last long (solar power?), Best of the Moody Blues ranks as one of my favourite groups and I don't get tired of listening to them.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions – and why?

Margaret Cavanaugh (National Science Foundation - National Science Board). Marge was my NSF program director a long time ago and had a very positive impact on my career. I haven't had a chance to talk to her much over the last 10 years as she has moved away from chemistry. Marge has been in both academics (chemistry professor) and involved in high level NSF activities. I'd like to keep her thinking about chemistry and Reactions might help.

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ann Valentine is in the Department of Chemistry at Yale University, and works on how biology handles metal ions that are very sensitive to hydrolysis.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

It was a "Goldilocks" decision...I loved basic science, but biology is too big (and also too complicated), and physics is too small (particle physics)... AND too big (astrophysics). Chemistry 'the molecular scale' was just right. Also, in my sophomore year of high school, my science club mentor, Ada Margaret Hutchison, let us have free rein in the lab for most of the year. I set a lot of things on fire. And I thought: sign me up for THIS!

2. If you weren't a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

I'd be a middle school science teacher. I love doing outreach programs with that age group - when kids aren't too cool to get unabashedly excited about science. High school kids, on the other hand, terrify me. There have been exceptions, but they're often too busy impressing each other to really get into science.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

In one of our projects I'm thinking about this afternoon, we're working out some fundamental interactions of Ti(IV) with biomolecules that I hope will lead one day to a wide appreciation for a role for this metal ion in biology. Right now we all think of titanium as being mostly inert, but I find it hard to accept that biology would never have found a productive use for this incredibly abundant element for which humans have found many applications.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

I'd pick Ed Ricketts, a sort of renegade marine biologist who worked in Monterey, CA until the 1940s. He was a buddy of John Steinbeck and the inspiration for his character "Doc" in Cannery Row. Steinbeck wrote a tribute called About Ed Ricketts that's now published with The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a book which describes their great adventure together. Reading that tribute makes me want to have a meal - or maybe a beer - with Ricketts. I imagine it would be scientifically enlightening but mostly really, really entertaining.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

My most recent lab notebook entry is June 22, 2007. I was trying to troubleshoot the purification of a ferritin protein by getting in there and doing it all myself. The final gel is missing because I got distracted by some other demand on my time and left the gel in destain for a week. More often now, rather than trying to do anything myself, l spend a few hours alongside a grad student "helping" them with an experiment or an instrument they're having trouble with - most often they figure it out themselves just to get me out of their way.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?

Wow, the urge is so strong to pick some highbrow thing that will make me sound smart and impressive. But I'll be honest - the one book I re-read every few years is A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. And an album I'd listen to anytime would be by Marc Cohn - let's say his "Live 04-05" disc for a mix of older and newer.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions - and why?

Have you interviewed Harry Gray yet? He can always be counted on to be entertaining - I'll bet he'd have great answers to your questions.

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This afternoon's session was one that leapt out of the (shoulder-destroying 2.4 kg) abstract book: Molecular Machines and Devices. Itamar Willner, Alan Rowan, Dirk Guldi, Lee Cronin and Harry Anderson. Some line-up! And all tucked away in a just-about-big-enough room in the depths of the conference venue.

Without wishing to summarise everything, I'm going to pick on the two talks I enjoyed most: Alan Rowan's and Lee Cronin's.

Alan Rowan covered his work trying to understand how long chain molecules thread through macrocycles - as an analogy to DNA polymerase. The macrocycle can be a catalyst that epoxidises double bonds, so being able to do it an controlled way would be very useful. Unlike the enzyme, it just hops about attacking double bonds almost at random. They've studied a non-catalytic macrocycle and found out all sorts about how the length of the chain and the size of the macrocycle affects things. I started to wonder if you could make a macrocycle with a variable aperture and control things that way - anyone got any ideas how to do that??

Lee Cronin's talk had tons of videos - ranging from 'cartoon' simulations of the insides of the polyoxometalate (POM) cavity materials his group makes. As he said, they were a little big of a rollercoaster ride and I found myself wishing I was sitting further away from the screen at one point! But they did emphasise the cavernous space inside these things - 'like a cathedral', as Cronin said. The other videos were actual films (through a microscope) of the microtube growth from POM crystallites, as reported in our own issue 1 (free to read!). The ones where the growth could be controlled and played about with went down very well. He finished off with some some videos of 'bags' of these materials, acting almost like little reaction vessels - the colour change of a potassium permanganate solution was very striking.

The theme continued with the Plenary from Ben Feringa, with an amazing array of molecular machinery. I'll leave you with some of his closing thoughts: Will we one day have nanomachines in our bloodstream, delivering drugs and tidying up our arteries? He doesn't know, but was optimistic, because today's chemist has a lot more available to him/her than nature did - we're not limited to amino acids, for a start!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The plenary lecture this morning was by Peter Bruce, from the University of St Andrews, over on the east coast of Scotland. His message was an appeal to chemists to open their minds in order to save the world from climate change. Free yourselves from thinking of the immediate applications, he said, and this challenge can be faced. "The chemistry to tackle this is still going to be fundamental chemistry," he says. Chemists should forget the immediate technical challenges.

Stirring stuff. And he had some very good reasons for saying this. Bruce has spent many years looking at ion transport in polymer electrolytes, and along the way has invented a better way to probe the structure of these large crystalline polymers that are otherwise too large to get x-ray crystal structures of.

How can this help climate change? Well these fundamental chemistry advances have found their way into lithium batteries - the things that charge our laptops, mobile phones, as well as powering tiny implantable medical devices of the future.

Bruce is now looking at ways that might - eventually - make the charging and recharging process of batteries much much faster. This process involves lithium ions moving from one material to another. They travel one way when the battery is being used, and when it's plugged in again to recharge, they hop back over from whence they came. As many of you will know, this can take hours.

Bruce's work on solid crystalline polymer electrolytes could help. But to understand how these materials work their molecular-scale structure needs to be understood. The problem has been getting single crystals to do crystallography on. So Bruce developed a powder diffraction technique that worked a treat.

He's also spent a lot of time investigating why and how these crystalline polymers can conduct. The reason is that ions in crystalline polymers hop, which is very different to the way floppy non-crystalline systems work, he says. The conductivities they show are way too low for industry, he says, but doesn't much care. "Scientifically it opens up new avenues," he said. And curiosity has led his group to investigate other metals in the same group of the periodic table as lithium.

Next is the challenge of making the energy density of the materials better. To try and get a ten-fold improvement in energy, Bruce has developed a lithium-air battery, where oxygen from air reacts to start the ion motion. It's a neat idea, and you never know, it could work.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember the latest addition to the periodic table, copernicium, element 112? Well the fall out from the name choice has begun.

The abbreviated symbol that discoverer Sigurd Hofmann chose was Cp. This hasn't been confirmed by IUPAC yet, and this is the body that has the say in the end, but it seems appropriate that here at the IUPAC congress that the discussion over this shortened symbol should be aired.

The problem is that for many synthetic chemists Cp already means something - it is used as a shorthand form for the cyclopentadienyl ring, a 5 carbon and 5 hydrogen ring that is aromatic like benzene and often used as a ligand.

So some chemists are inevitably unhappy about the use of Cp for another purpose. One of these is Paul Chirik from Cornell University who in his talk about main group chemistry apparently said he wanted to start a campaign to have the abbreviation Kp, not Cp used for element 112. This, apparently is etymologically correct, because Copernicus was actually Polish and his name was spelled Mikolaj Koppernigk.

Chirik assures me he said this in jest and is by no means an expert in this area. But I wholeheartedly encourage this kind of campaign! Come on chemists, stand up for the rights of cyclopentadienyl ligands! Kp vs Cp - what do you think?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

So since Monday I've been hopping between a few different symposia, starting with Functional Metal Complexes and Ligand Design, a meaty bit of Main Group Chemistry and finishing off with a little Degradable Polymers for Biomedical Applications. And of course the Plenaries ranging from the H + H2 reaction (a truly excellent talk from Dick Zare) to dendrimers/graphene ribbons (and a lot else besides from Klaus Müllen) to protein misfolding (well put across for chemists by Christopher Dobson). [It's nice to see the increasing numbers of atoms involved in those three talks - which is certainly not to say complexity based on some the calculations/experiments Zare carefully didn't go into too much detail on!]

Phew! What's caught my eye then?

Probably the first session in the Main Group symposium. Rab Mulvey's keynote gave a good overview of his work adding metals to organic compounds that don't normally like to be metallated - and with metals that don't normally like to be added. Metals outside of Group 1 are a bit shy of being added, but if there's a Group 1 metal there to hold their hand, it can be done. It's illustrated well in this Angewandte Chemie cover with the punning subtitle "Check M(etall)ate". I think this needs explaining! Thankfully, he did: the queen (Na, Li) is normally the most powerful piece on the board (best at metallating), but this time it's the lowly knight (Cr, Mn, Fe) that is holding the king (benzene or similar) in check, with the queen (Na, Li) covering (synergically bonding). Great analogy!

I also enjoyed Mikael Håkansson's talk. He started with a quotation from McMurry's Organic Chemistry that you can't generate optical activity from non-optically active starting materials. Wrong! Håkansson showed some examples of chiral Grignard intermediates that are racemic in solution, but only one form crystallises. Induce crystallisation and you've got something chiral from achiral starting materials. If you then do a reaction in a solvent that promotes the reactions while hindering racemisation, you can go on to make other chiral compounds. I talked to him during the coffee break and he said he's hoping other people take the idea forward, because at the moment the compounds he's made aren't too useful. Watch this space.

And finally...beware inorganic chemistry journal editors with the same 'hairstyles' (or rather, lack of) - an author of a Perspective in the next issue got confused by my similarity to Jamie Humphrey, editor of the RSC's Dalton Transactions. What do you think? Separated at birth [scroll down]?

Jamie HumNeil

Neil Withers (Associated Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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Disaster struck at the poster session tonight. I thought that the session organisers had decided to extend the reach of refreshments provided to include rose wine (a summer drink) and I gladly took a glass full of the pink stuff. To my horror I discovered it was cranberry juice. Tsk.

Luckily, to calm my nerves I had the pleasure of talking to Charlotte Mallet a PhD student from the University of Angers, France. She explained to me that she was trying to take biomass - cellulosic waste from agricultural processes - and make electronic devices.

So far she has managed to make oligomers based on furans, derived from the fructose molecules she gets from the biomass. From this she can make an organic plastic and from that a transistor. The properties of this device aren't quite good enough for industry, Mallet says, because they have low mobility, which means they can't carry electrons very well. But she is working hard to improve this and hopes to have a news device by September.

I'm not sure how seriously this proposition will be taken in attempts to save the world from burning fossil fuels, but perhaps every little helps.

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Back in my youth, when deciding what subjects to study at school and university I wanted to make sure that I would come out versed in something that would be of use to the wider world, perhaps even do some good. I chose chemistry. It's clear from conferences like this that many chemists are interested in the subject for similar reasons.

Climate change is a big topic that chemists are tackling. This morning's session on carbon capture and storage being a good example.

This is a technology intended to clean up coal-powered power stations by scrubbing out carbon dioxide from flue gas, and compressing it to be stored elsewhere - anywhere but into the atmosphere.

There are a number of problems that chemists are looking at. Today kicked off with a talk by Gary Rochelle from the University of Texas at Austin. He took us through the major considerations that are needed for the solvent that is used to collect the carbon dioxide from the gas. The standard at the moment is something called MEA, monoethanolamine. Rochelle's fundamental physical chemistry calculations on this and other candidate solvents showed that there isn't a simple one-size-fits-all solvent. The considerations are: capacity of the solvent to hold carbon dioxide; how much the solvent degrades when heated; how fast the reaction is; how much heat it requires.

Some of these properties are better in different solvent, he says, which are again different in different plants. Another good candidate solvent looks to be piperazine.

Then we heard from Trevor Drage from Nottingham University, UK, about using solids not liquid solvents to strip out the carbon dioxide. His systems are a long way from being scaleable but show promise. On paper, he said, solid sorbets could reduce energy loading in the systems by 30 - 50%. These systems are amine polymers loaded onto porous silica-based materials, or basic nitrogen in an activated carbon matrix.

One area that is often overlooked, says Drage is the regeneration of these sorbents and how the carbon dioxide is removed so they can be reused.

Matthew Hunt is from Doosan Babcock, a Scottish-based company
spending a lot of effort in scaling up CCS technology, with demonstration plants in Canada. This is just a 4 tonne plant so far, which is no real use for a power plant which will need to porcess 850 tonnes of carbon dioxide a day, he said. But according to Hunt, the company is on track to full-scale post-combustion carbon dioxide removal by 2014.

Of course, the impetus for these small demonstration scale plants needs to come from government, and the feeling in certain quarters of this meeting at least, was that not enough push, and not enough decisiveness is being shown to make the technology viable.

My hope is that in 2014 we are not still at the stage where academics working in small groups are showing results of small scale CCS projects and saying that scale up is needed urgently.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a quick post to mention that I've worked out how to tweet from my phone to the @NatureChemistry Twitter feed, so head there to follow for some live updates from IUPAC.

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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If you happen to swing by the Nature stand at the IUPAC congress exhibition, you'll have a rare treat. In the booth opposite is the stand for the next IUPAC congress, which will be in Puerto Rico in two year's time. 2011 is also going to be the International Year of Chemistry.

The stand there has on a loop a video of Puerto Rico's most famous (?) export Ricky Martin, as well as Marc Anthony (J. Lo's husband). This really is a rare treat in a chemistry conference, let me tell you.

Another treat is bumping into the congress chairman over a glass of wine at the poster session. Paul O'Brien from Manchester University seemed to be feeling the pressure of constant dinner engagements over the week. He said the whole experience made him nervous. From where I was standing listening to the gentle murmur of happy chemists I would say that any nerves were unfounded.

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Chemists love to talk about the details of a synthetic reaction: swapping this carbon atom for that one, changing the angle between sulfur atoms by 2 degrees and so on. So during this morning's talk by Daniel Rabinovich from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was happy to listen to him talking about tinkering with ligands to try and recreate the chemical environment that a copper atom finds itself in the small protein methanobactin thinking no more of it other than "chemists like to try and do this kind of thing".

Methanobactins are a small part of the large bacteria called methanotrophic bacteria that use methane to make their own carbon and energy. At their heart is a copper binding compound, which has fairly unusual chemical groups called thiones around it. As far as I could tell, the interest was in the synthetic challenge in recreating these unusual chemical group around the copper atom.

I mean, if chemists want to try and mimic nature's functions they tend to go after big things, like photosystem II, or a huge protein structure.

But I was wrong. It turns out that a patent was granted (to other scientists unrelated to this work) on the small copper-based protein methanobactin because it is a potent antibacterial agent against S. aureus, although this is a delicate protein that will be hard to recreate in its natural form.

Whilst trying to recreate the chemical geometry of the copper atom in this small delicate protein, Rabinovich actually found a way to make a synthetic version of an antibacterial, and that is what he's working on now.

Rabinovich has a better chance of making large amounts of the stuff. His work was all based on known procedures - albeit some obscure ones.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am, like Katharine, attending the 42nd IUPAC General Congress in Glasgow. Chemists from around the globe have descended to discuss chemistry in as broad a sense as possible - there are 20 parallel sessions, and the abstract book weighs 2.4 kg (nearly 5 lb 5 oz for any metricophobes out there). I'm facing a dilemma every session, having to sacrifice 2 or 3 talks that I really want to see! I might do a blog post at the end of the week about the interesting chemistry I DIDN'T have chance to see...

So what have I been doing? After the first plenary (read Phil from Chemistry World's take on Sir Harry Kroto's talk here), I went to a session on Adaptive Nanomaterials. It's interesting to see that in not such a long time, work on nanomaterials has gone from 'Look, it's really small!' to 'Look, we can sense and discriminate proteins at 5 nanomolar level in a mix of other proteins that are in millimolar concentration!' And that's pretty cool. Vince Rotello's gold nanoparticles need to be functionalised with polymers etc first.

I spent the afternoon hearing about MOFs (metal-organic frameworks). Or are they coordination polymers?? There seems to be a little bit of debate over the matter, but Lee Brammer of Sheffield offered a good distinction: they're MOFs when they're open and porous, whereas coordination polymers don't necessarily have the pores. Anyway, whatever you call them, they were excellent talks about an interesting topic. All of which made me ponder on how the wonderful range of MOFs are all thanks to the quirky nature of transitional metal coordination bonds. Not just tetrahedral for those guys! Eat your heart out carbon [yes, I am inorganic chemist...].

It's nearly time for day 2 to kick off, so I'm going to head over to the armadillo for Vivian Yam's plenary.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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On my way up to Glasgow from London I did a spot of sailing. On the trip from Fleetwood, Lancashire, to Whitehaven, Cumbria, for a long time we could see the nuclear fuel plant Sellafield. It spans a vast area of the Cumbrian coast line.

So it was with interest that I spotted a poster by phd student Sarah Wallace from Leeds University in the UK.

She has been looking at how strontium, a waste prduct from Sellafield, wil move in the sediment near the plant, and if it might make it into the groundwater.

The contaminant plumes from the plant tend to have a high pH, and what Wallace had found so far is that in these conditions strontium-90 likes to stick to sediment. This could actually be good news for Sellafield because the half life of strontium90 is such that as long as it sticks to the ground it will have decayed within 300 years or so.

Strontium is potentially nasty because it's in the same chemical group as calcium, a major bone component. So if strontium gets into the water and into the body, it can compete with calcium in the bones and cause diseases such as leukemia.

Wallaces work involved a fake contaminated bit of land - taking normal soil and untouched groundwater from the area and spiking it. In future she hopes to see what the longer term effects of strontium-90 are.

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Who'd have thunk it - a chemistry conference full of space news. It's not that weird really, when you consider that the search for life = search for molecules.

Lars Kristensen from Leiden University in the Netherlands today showed us his maps of methanol in space. He is making these maps so he can see how methanol is distributed in the material that young stars are made from. Methanol is used as a tracer for early star formation and forms on the surface of interstellar ice-covered dust grains. He'll also soon be able to compare his methanol maps with results of water abundance from Herschel, which set off recently to check out the most distant objects in the universe.

Methanol forms as ice on dust grains. According to Kristensen, the major way that the methanol escapes from the surface of these grains is not by heating thermally, but by a non-thermal mechanism, be that activation by UV light, or other methods.

The abundance of methanol in the areas that Kristensen looked at, using the Harp B instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, was constant throughout those areas, he says.

Check below the fold for one of his maps.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello from Glasgow, Scotland. Home to the deep fried mars bar, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gordon Brown MP, and now, for one week only, the IUPAC congress.

I'm here to delve into the finer points of chemistry and to see what is getting chemists salivating this year.

The first session I went to was about artificial photosynthesis. The process that plants carry out with ease - turning sunlight into stored energy - is causing a major headache for scientists trying to mimic the process.

Rather than try to rebuild the molecules used by nature for photosynthesis, chemists are looking at systems that they can build and understand better, and use them to do the same jobs that plants do with their complex molecular machinery.

In these systems, sunlight is used to power the separation of charge - from a neutral molecule to one with a positive and negative component. But the big problem is keeping those charged states apart from one another for any length of time. If they recombine, the charge separation, which could lead to electric current, is lost.

Today I got to see how making the molecules really long with the charged ends separate from each other in space can help. Ken Ghiggino from the University of Melbourne, Australia, uses a set of four porphyrins, which are big ring-shaped molecules. One end has a zinc atom sitting inside the ring and the other a gold atom. These two metals can shunt a charge from one end to the other. The trouble is that this kind of system is far too complicated to ever be manufactured on a large scale.

Another suggestion is simple dyad systems with one charge donating and one charge accepting part. But as Andy Benniston from Newcastle University showed us, to separate the charge with these systems is also not as easy as hoped. He suggested that when previous chemists have claimed to have a long lived charge separated state what they had actually done was form a different quantum state called a triplet state. This is something else entirely.

All this is yet more evidence that nature is unfathomably clever in its use of molecular processes to gain energy, and that humans are way behind in our understanding. But thanks to chemists who refuse to get depressed by this notion, one day we may just be able to take sunlight and produce energy that we can store and use at will, without destroying our world.

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