Happy New Year! Here are the first batch of Research Highlights of 2009. (Although I should confess that we wrote them last year…)

So, we all know fuel cells are going to rule the energy world soon…but not if they’re stuffed full with platinum and similarly expensive metals. Which is why replacing such precious metals with cheaper ones, like silver, at the cathode is so important. [FYI: I checked out the market and silver is about 100 times cheaper than platinum]

The biological world is full of long chain molecules, like DNA or proteins. How exactly these chains manage to thread through pores – either in enzymes or membranes – is pretty challenging. We’re getting closer to understanding thanks to some clever chemistry: threading a fluorescent polymer through a macrocycle until it reaches a certain point, at which it stops fluorescing. The kinetics of threading can therefore by studied by the fluorescence quenching.

Hyperpolarised xenon has been investigated as an alternative to using gadolinium compounds as contrast agents in MRI – it can be probed directly instead of protons. And now Ivan Dmochowski and colleagues have used 129-Xe as a biosensor that can determine the difference between two isozymes of carbonic anhydrase.

So, apart from the honour of being featured on In the Pipeline, what else have we been checking out in the new year? Steve’s been looking at some pretty pictures, thanks to his former home Lab on a Chip and their Art in Science feature. I’ve been learning how to make your home-brew nice and cloud-free – it’s all down to Stokes Law and a galactose polymer (carrageenan)…

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Happy New Year! Here are the first batch of Research Highlights of 2009. (Although I should confess that we wrote them last year…)

So, we all know fuel cells are going to rule the energy world soon…but not if they’re stuffed full with platinum and similarly expensive metals. Which is why replacing such precious metals with cheaper ones, like silver, at the cathode is so important. [FYI: I checked out the market and silver is about 100 times cheaper than platinum]

The biological world is full of long chain molecules, like DNA or proteins. How exactly these chains manage to thread through pores – either in enzymes or membranes – is pretty challenging. We’re getting closer to understanding thanks to some clever chemistry: threading a fluorescent polymer through a macrocycle until it reaches a certain point, at which it stops fluorescing. The kinetics of threading can therefore by studied by the fluorescence quenching.

Hyperpolarised xenon has been investigated as an alternative to using gadolinium compounds as contrast agents in MRI – it can be probed directly instead of protons. And now Ivan Dmochowski and colleagues have used 129-Xe as a biosensor that can determine the difference between two isozymes of carbonic anhydrase.

So, apart from the honour of being featured on In the Pipeline, what else have we been checking out in the new year? Steve’s been looking at some pretty pictures, thanks to his former home Lab on a Chip and their Art in Science feature. I’ve been learning how to make your home-brew nice and cloud-free – it’s all down to Stokes Law and a galactose polymer (carrageenan)…

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

So, with 2008 drawing to a close, we thought we’d select our favourites from the chemistry we’ve covered this year. The five of us editors had two picks each, so here’s our top 10 (in no particular order):

Gav

Ion transport: Testing the water

Eigen complexes, Zundel complexes, Grotthuss mechanism: there’s some great terminology related to water structure but we still don’t fully understand it! This paper was a good example of how fancy spectroscopic techniques can be used to understand just what is going on with the seriously speedy diffusion of hydroxide ions in water.

Catalytic hydrogenation: Guided by theory

The importance of heterogeneous catalysis to the chemical industry really can’t be overstated, so one of my favourites this year was this theoretical paper by Jens Nørskov and friends. They use computational methods to seek out the best (and economically viable) alternatives to expensive industry-standard hydrogenation catalysts. Watch out for a review in this area next year!

Stu

Nobel Prize 2008: Green fluorescent protein

Over the past few years GFP has been a favourite pick in the numerous ‘what will win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year’ lists. And now it has — and deservingly so. The question is, what will be the consensus pick for the next few years?

Coordination polymers: Ringing the changes

A research highlight that combines two of my favourite things — beer and football…no wait, I mean coordination polymers and Borromean rings.

Steve

Organocatalysis: Making light work of it

Most organocatalytic reactions involve typical polar reactions between one nucleophilic and one electrophilic partner. Not only is this approach radical, solving a long-standing problem in asymmetric synthesis, it was also the easiest headline I wrote all year.

Enzyme catalysis: Enantioselectivity evolved

Everyone knows that enzymes are good catalysts, but the search for the right enzyme can be a long one. I love the idea of training an enzyme to do what you want – and biasing evolution by using a clever reaction design is probably the ultimate way of achieving this.

Anne

Chirality: Handed over

Chirality can be a somewhat tricky property to introduce in materials. Here, the chirality of organic linkers is preserved and passed on to the bulk of an organosilicate material directly during the synthesis — a very elegant chirality transfer.

Molecular network: Random order

Check out these molecules that, when adsorbed onto a surface, form hexagonal ‘holes’ in a regular array regardless of how they arrange themselves. This leads to an ordered — yet aperiodic — molecular network.

Neil

Protein chemistry: Handy crystallization

The combination of painstaking chemical synthesis of both forms of the protein, followed by the conceptual leap to crystallise both of them in order to get the X-ray structure, made these two papers extremely impressive. And when you add the cool application – antifreeze proteins to help preserve donated organs — it adds up to work that made me say ‘I wish we’d published it!’

Superconductivity: The good samarium

It’s solid state inorganic chemistry, it’s superconductivity — I love it. This is just a sample of the ‘gold rush’ of work that was triggered by the pnictide superconductors.

And slightly less seriously, here are our top 10 Research Highlight headlines of the year:

Come on silene

The magnificent seven

Cage closed

The good samarium

Heterogeneous chemistry on Mars

All features great and small

Knot your usual molecules

Supersize sandwich

The 39 steps

Caught in a trap

And many thanks to Jane for copy-editing and Dipti for publishing everything for us all year!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

So, with 2008 drawing to a close, we thought we’d select our favourites from the chemistry we’ve covered this year. The five of us editors had two picks each, so here’s our top 10 (in no particular order):

Gav

Ion transport: Testing the water

Eigen complexes, Zundel complexes, Grotthuss mechanism: there’s some great terminology related to water structure but we still don’t fully understand it! This paper was a good example of how fancy spectroscopic techniques can be used to understand just what is going on with the seriously speedy diffusion of hydroxide ions in water.

Catalytic hydrogenation: Guided by theory

The importance of heterogeneous catalysis to the chemical industry really can’t be overstated, so one of my favourites this year was this theoretical paper by Jens Nørskov and friends. They use computational methods to seek out the best (and economically viable) alternatives to expensive industry-standard hydrogenation catalysts. Watch out for a review in this area next year!

Stu

Nobel Prize 2008: Green fluorescent protein

Over the past few years GFP has been a favourite pick in the numerous ‘what will win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year’ lists. And now it has — and deservingly so. The question is, what will be the consensus pick for the next few years?

Coordination polymers: Ringing the changes

A research highlight that combines two of my favourite things — beer and football…no wait, I mean coordination polymers and Borromean rings.

Steve

Organocatalysis: Making light work of it

Most organocatalytic reactions involve typical polar reactions between one nucleophilic and one electrophilic partner. Not only is this approach radical, solving a long-standing problem in asymmetric synthesis, it was also the easiest headline I wrote all year.

Enzyme catalysis: Enantioselectivity evolved

Everyone knows that enzymes are good catalysts, but the search for the right enzyme can be a long one. I love the idea of training an enzyme to do what you want – and biasing evolution by using a clever reaction design is probably the ultimate way of achieving this.

Anne

Chirality: Handed over

Chirality can be a somewhat tricky property to introduce in materials. Here, the chirality of organic linkers is preserved and passed on to the bulk of an organosilicate material directly during the synthesis — a very elegant chirality transfer.

Molecular network: Random order

Check out these molecules that, when adsorbed onto a surface, form hexagonal ‘holes’ in a regular array regardless of how they arrange themselves. This leads to an ordered — yet aperiodic — molecular network.

Neil

Protein chemistry: Handy crystallization

The combination of painstaking chemical synthesis of both forms of the protein, followed by the conceptual leap to crystallise both of them in order to get the X-ray structure, made these two papers extremely impressive. And when you add the cool application – antifreeze proteins to help preserve donated organs — it adds up to work that made me say ‘I wish we’d published it!’

Superconductivity: The good samarium

It’s solid state inorganic chemistry, it’s superconductivity — I love it. This is just a sample of the ‘gold rush’ of work that was triggered by the pnictide superconductors.

And slightly less seriously, here are our top 10 Research Highlight headlines of the year:

Come on silene

The magnificent seven

Cage closed

The good samarium

Heterogeneous chemistry on Mars

All features great and small

Knot your usual molecules

Supersize sandwich

The 39 steps

Caught in a trap

And many thanks to Jane for copy-editing and Dipti for publishing everything for us all year!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

I’m dreaming of…Research Highlights.

Making tertiary alcohols (ones without any hydrogen atoms attached to the carbon) with controlled chirality is a lot trickier than making other chiral species like secondary alcohols — those methods often rely on the difference in size between hydrogen and the other substituent. But now, using a simple method allows the choice of two achiral reagents to control which enantiomer is formed. And don’t forget to check out the News and Views article that Andy sold his soul so you can read it for FREE (for a week).

Germanium is an element in the no-man’s land of semi-metals between metallic and non-metallic elements, but it’s still not really a metal. And non-metals have rarely been observed as dications without a lot of accompanying ligands. But now dicationic germanium has been trapped inside a cryptand cage and caught with no clothes on. Which is a great amount of effort to go to in order to let Gav use the headline Caught in a trap.

And my prayers have been answered: a paper with supplementary info movies that show what’s going on. So, go and read Tim’s highlight about nanocapsules shuttling up and down inside carbon nanotubes, then watch the videos.

And finally…even though we haven’t published any issues yet, and won’t have an impact factor until about 2011, when we’re out and about we still get asked what we think Nature Chemistry’s magic number will be. Who knows?? Perhaps by then Thompson ISI will be using the corrected impact factor, as suggested by our heroes over at PHD comics.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

I’m dreaming of…Research Highlights.

Making tertiary alcohols (ones without any hydrogen atoms attached to the carbon) with controlled chirality is a lot trickier than making other chiral species like secondary alcohols — those methods often rely on the difference in size between hydrogen and the other substituent. But now, using a simple method allows the choice of two achiral reagents to control which enantiomer is formed. And don’t forget to check out the News and Views article that Andy sold his soul so you can read it for FREE (for a week).

Germanium is an element in the no-man’s land of semi-metals between metallic and non-metallic elements, but it’s still not really a metal. And non-metals have rarely been observed as dications without a lot of accompanying ligands. But now dicationic germanium has been trapped inside a cryptand cage and caught with no clothes on. Which is a great amount of effort to go to in order to let Gav use the headline Caught in a trap.

And my prayers have been answered: a paper with supplementary info movies that show what’s going on. So, go and read Tim’s highlight about nanocapsules shuttling up and down inside carbon nanotubes, then watch the videos.

And finally…even though we haven’t published any issues yet, and won’t have an impact factor until about 2011, when we’re out and about we still get asked what we think Nature Chemistry’s magic number will be. Who knows?? Perhaps by then Thompson ISI will be using the corrected impact factor, as suggested by our heroes over at PHD comics.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

A busy week in the Nature Chemistry office: Anne has just returned from a tour of Japanese universities, Stu is about to head off to Bath for Catalysis and Sensing for our Environment 08, Gav’s already in Grenoble for ElecMol 08, Steve’s visiting Harvard tomorrow and I’m off to a symposium in honour of Professor the Lord Lewis of Newnham at the Royal Society on Thursday and Friday. Phew! But we’ve still time to bring you a dose of Research Highlights.

Total synthesis can be mind-bogglingly difficult, so why not just go and marvel at bryostatin 16?

Dendrimers, I imagine, are probably normally a big writhing mass of chemistry, but these pyrene dendrimers sound a lot more…staid. Thanks to the stiffness of the dendron units themselves, the whole thing is pretty rigid.

Another article that really needs a movie…swimming microparticles! Although rowing is quite a good way to get your head round it. A big particle (the boat) is linked to a smaller one (the oar). They’re magnetic, so a precessing magnetic field makes them rotate (errr, the rower? Bear with me!). In a bulk solvent, they’d just happily rotate, but when they’re close to a surface, the viscosity gradient means that the oar ‘grips’ the the gloopier liquid and the particle/boat moves.

And finally…some shameless slapping of our own backs. According to this post over at Nascent, we almost totally rule! Well, we’re in joint second place for the chemistry blog most linked from the blogs registered at nature.com blogs.

Thanks for linking,

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

A busy week in the Nature Chemistry office: Anne has just returned from a tour of Japanese universities, Stu is about to head off to Bath for Catalysis and Sensing for our Environment 08, Gav’s already in Grenoble for ElecMol 08, Steve’s visiting Harvard tomorrow and I’m off to a symposium in honour of Professor the Lord Lewis of Newnham at the Royal Society on Thursday and Friday. Phew! But we’ve still time to bring you a dose of Research Highlights.

Total synthesis can be mind-bogglingly difficult, so why not just go and marvel at bryostatin 16?

Dendrimers, I imagine, are probably normally a big writhing mass of chemistry, but these pyrene dendrimers sound a lot more…staid. Thanks to the stiffness of the dendron units themselves, the whole thing is pretty rigid.

Another article that really needs a movie…swimming microparticles! Although rowing is quite a good way to get your head round it. A big particle (the boat) is linked to a smaller one (the oar). They’re magnetic, so a precessing magnetic field makes them rotate (errr, the rower? Bear with me!). In a bulk solvent, they’d just happily rotate, but when they’re close to a surface, the viscosity gradient means that the oar ‘grips’ the the gloopier liquid and the particle/boat moves.

And finally…some shameless slapping of our own backs. According to this post over at Nascent, we almost totally rule! Well, we’re in joint second place for the chemistry blog most linked from the blogs registered at nature.com blogs.

Thanks for linking,

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)