Monthly Archives: July 2010

Reactions – Myunghyun Paik Suh

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Myunghyun Paik Suh is in the Department of Chemistry at Seoul National University in Korea, where she works on functional coordination polymers – including porous metal-organic frameworks that can be applied in the storage and separation of organic molecules and gases.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I’ve enjoyed science and mathematics since I was an elementary student. While studying these topics, I would forget about the whole world. I found extreme happiness by solving difficult problems. I wanted to be a mathematician or a scientist – I chose to be a chemist because I thought chemists can solve human problems in a more direct way than other sciences.

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

A violinist. I started playing violin at the age of 6 and I loved it. I was recognized as a good violinist and I considered becoming a professional, but my parents did not want me to be a musician.Even though I never became a professional violinist, I still enjoy playing music.

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

I am developing smart solid materials that can selectively and efficiently capture carbon dioxide from industry flue gas. I hope that these materials can be applied in industry to capture carbon dioxide, which will contribute to solving the problem of global warming.

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

I would like to have dinner with Albert Einstein, who is a genius and also a violinist. I am fascinated by his exceptionally high IQ and EQ.

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

My last experiment in the lab was about 6 years ago when a student measured the magnetic susceptibility of a compound. He had to prepare a sample with great care, and I worked with him in the lab for an entire week.

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

I would take a bible and an album of Viotti violin concertos (# 22 and 23) with me. I would take the time to re-write the whole bible, which I believe would enhance my religious mind. When listening to Viotti violin concertos, all my emotions burst out. Life would not be boring even on a desert island.

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

Professor George Whitesides. I am curious to hear what such an active chemist would have done if he had chosen something other than chemistry.

Making more of methods

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As a synthetic chemist the first thing I usually want to know about a chemical compound is “How did they make it?” and then “How do they know they made it?” However, synthetic procedures and characterization data for compounds are often found lurking in an article’s Methods section or in the depths of the Supplementary Information.

Not any more! We are now testing a new feature for the Nature Chemistry website that displays the procedure for making a chemical compound on its compound information page. Our first example of this can be found in Howard Colquhoun’s article in the August issue of Nature Chemistry which is live online today.

Compound pages – which display lots of other useful information about the structure – are easily accessed by clicking on hyperlinked bold compound numbers in the HTML version of an article. Where the paragraphs of text describing the synthesis and characterization of the compound are provided by an author, they will be displayed under the heading “Synthetic Procedure” on these pages. From the procedure you can view any other structures mentioned by bold number and navigate to their compound pages by hovering or clicking on the hyperlinked numbers respectively. This makes it really easy to follow the chain of the reaction you are interested in.

Following the links at the top of the compound pages you can still jump back to the article to find the full experimental details in the Methods section or Supplementary Information. We also encourage authors to provide us with raw data files – such as CIF files – which can be displayed on the compound pages.

We hope that including synthetic procedures and data on the compound pages makes it faster to browse for what you are looking for. Pulling all this information together in the article HTML will not only feed OSCAR the journal-eating robot, but also make life easier for over-worked lab-rats bench-monkeys post-graduate students.

Have a play and see what you think – this is only at quite an early stage, so any feedback would be gratefully received.

Laura

Laura Croft (Technical Editor, Nature Chemistry)

BOSS: Minimal ‘enzymes’ for catalysis

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There were many great talks yesterday at the Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium, but as I have time to describe just one, I’ll mention Eric Jacobsen’s tour de force about hydrogen-bonding catalysis. This seems to be an area that’s really kicking off right now.

His thesis is that hydrogen-bonding catalysts shouldn’t be thought of in the way that chemists tend to conceptualize asymmetric catalysts in general – that is, as molecules or complexes that bind to substrates in order to block the approach of reactants from certain directions. Instead, he made the case that hydrogen-bonding catalysts act more like enzymes, activating and/or stabilizing the substrate (or the substrate’s transition state)through hydrogen bonding. That’s not to say that steric interactions are unimportant, clearly they still have an impact. But to fully understand how hydrogen-bonding catalysts work, he argues that you need to look first at the stabilizing effects of non-covalent interactions.

He backed this up with many case studies of hydrogen-bonding catalysts from his own lab (such as those for Claisen rearrangements, polyene cyclizations and Strecker-like reactions), in each case providing a detailed analysis of how each catalyst works. It’s all beautiful stuff, and you find some it in JACS (see the abstract for his analysis of the Strecker reaction here).

Today is the last day of the meeting, so this is where I’ll sign off from Belgium. I’ve only been able to discuss a handful of the presentations, but there were many other highlights at this meeting. I can only encourage organic chemists out there to come to the next meeting in the BOSS series, in 2012 – you won’t be disappointed.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

BOSS: Bottoms up!

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Day three of the Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium, and the heat wave continues. That means there have been plenty of excuses for conference attendees to drink Belgian beer, as the title of this blog implies. But we were also treated to a spectacular talk today by Kenichiro Itami, who presented (among other things) his latest research towards the bottom-up synthesis of carbon nanotubes.

Itami’s grand strategy is to prepare nanorings of benzenes, known as cycloparaphenylenes (CPPs), then to stack them up into cylinders and join them together in aromatization reactions – hey presto, you get a carbon nanotube. He’s not the only person pursuing this strategy, as both Carolyn Bertozzi and Shigeru Yamago seem to be trying the same thing.

The first problem to overcome in this approach was how to make the inherently ring-strained CPPs – Bertozzi published her solution in 2008 (you can see the abstract for the JACS paper here), closely followed by Itami in 2009 (in Angewandte, abstract here), then by Yamago this year (also in Angewandte, abstract here). Itami is now concentrating on finding a scaleable route for making CPPs, so that he has sufficient material to attempt the all-important aromatization reaction. He’s not quite there yet, but he has come up with an impressively concise synthesis of a CPP, and just needs to optimize the yields.

In the mean time, he’s also devised a general, modular synthesis that allows access to CPPs of different sizes, and he presented some rather beautiful crystal structures of a CPP – interestingly, the molecules stack up in much the way you would need them to if you wanted to fuse them together into a nanotube.

No doubt Bertozzi and Yamago are also making advances of their own, so I’ll certainly be following the progress in the race for a bottom-up synthesis of carbon nanotubes.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

BOSS: If you can’t stand the heat

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I enjoyed the Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium in 2008 so much that I decided to go to another one. So, here I am in Namur, capital of the Wallonian region of Belgium, where they’ve been having a mini-heatwave – and where my hotel room has no air conditioning. So, forgive me if this turns out to be a short entry, but it’s hard to concentrate on blogging when the temperature is 30 °C.

The meeting has got off to a terrific start, with Dave MacMillan undergoing the usual rite of passage as the recipient of the ‘Tetrahedron Chair’ prize – he gave four lectures today on organocatalysis. The lectures are billed as a one-day course, and so unsurprisingly there wasn’t much in the way of new results. But there were a few teasers of things to come from the MacMillan lab. Look out for Dave’s forthcoming synthesis of strychnine, completed in an amazing 12 steps. I think this might be the shortest route ever, but feel free to correct me. Dave also mentioned that his lab is currently looking for alternatives to Hantzsch esters as hydride sources for organocatalytic reductions, and briefly described a soon-to-be-published method for the alpha-amination of aldehydes.

You might think that a whole day listening to one person speak would be wearing, but Dave has such a conversational style that his lectures feel more like one-to-one chats, in which he gives you the inside scoop on how his greatest discoveries were made. Even the lure of free Belgian beer (given away as a freebie at the end of today’s programme) didn’t deprive him of any of his audience.

And speaking of Belgian beer, the thought of a cold, frosty one is extremely appealing from my oven of a hotel room. So I’m going to go and get one.

Andy

(Andrew Mitchinson, Senior Editor, Nature)

Materials Girl: Sunshine in June, but the lab has no windows

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[Posted on behalf of Materials Girl]

Three years ago, while still an undergrad with zero notion of “research”, I wrote a post that briefly pondered the summer life of a grad student. The following year I discovered that summer = vacation for the younger masses only. Now that the regular school year is over, I’m experiencing my first summer as a graduate researcher. So far, this has been time to catch up on the research that I neglected during the school year. (Apparently, a grad school B– = undergrad C– = failure + retake class = extra motivation to maintain straight As! Plus, TAing is awesome, even if in an often painful manner.)

Grad students resemble “normal” working people, only we work longer hours (and/or organize time poorly/try to make up for the time wasted during regular work hours), have a lower salary, and get away with wearing hole-filled jeans and t-shirts from high school. Or as in my case, we get paid nothing. Last week I offhandedly asked “our beloved supervisor” to start paying me during the summer; my financial aid and TAing contract from the department ended in June. He laughed/chuckled/smirked(?) and mentioned that I should apply for the NSF fellowship* again, then changed the subject. Ummm, time for more student loans? This might be a reason to find a wealthier advisor, if only I didn’t genuinely like my projects and group – a recent, but decisive development… The combination of happiness and grad school seems a rare commodity. I’m hanging onto my 7am–10pm motivation for dear life.

*They only gave me an honorable mention this year — and thus no money. /grumbling

So, the summers are for good work – and a couple of good breaks. And, apparently, we never work enough. The internet, among other things, provides countless horror stories of advisors deporting international students who fail to meet some absurdly high standards, brusquely demanding work 20/7** (a useless gesture, as this likely results in lower quality results and inefficient time management), etc. I have little problem with working unspeakably hard, assuming that the projects are worthwhile. However, I want to be the one motivating myself and scheduling my own time, instead of having an irate PI taking attendance and cracking the whip. As it is, one reason I’ve learned to be happy in grad school is that my PI doesn’t micromanage us from day-to-day – he generally just picks on our data and masterminds numerous ideas to try [which may or may not be of value, but that’s a different issue!]. Besides, with all the random assignments, it is not even necessary for him to demand nights and weekends – if I am to present anything decent at our weekly group meetings! Motivation by necessity is much more enjoyable than by direct force.

**20 hours a day, 7 days a week. They do, at least, acknowledge that we are primarily human and need SOME sleep. During my first or second month in the group, my advisor mentioned that getting over 4 hours a night means I’m not working hard enough. He was grinning, and to this day I haven’t figured out if that was a joke or a passive-aggressive communication regarding my work ethic.

At the end of the day, I’m enjoying my serfdom/hermithood, and I even take occasional nights off to… umm… I actually don’t know what to do with “spare time”… Still, though, can I get a stipend already?