{"id":2504,"date":"2008-11-24T05:15:57","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T05:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/2008\/11\/nchem-research-highlights-metathesis-omniphobes-and-di-iron.html"},"modified":"2011-12-20T11:08:57","modified_gmt":"2011-12-20T11:08:57","slug":"nchem_research_highlights_meta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/2008\/11\/nchem_research_highlights_meta.html","title":{"rendered":"NChem Research Highlights: Metathesis, omniphobes and di-iron"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s be havin’<\/a> some Research Highlights<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ring-closing metathesis lets you (well, organic chemists) make a lot of different sizes of rings, and is tolerant to different functional groups, but it still can’t quite do everything. It’s domination of the world has come a step closer, however, thanks to some fluxional ligands<\/a>. The catalysts are stereogenic at the metal centre, meaning you (well, organic chemists) can do rapid enantioselective catalysis.<\/p>\n

Papers about hydrophobic surfaces often contain great pictures and\/or videos of the materials in action (which provides me with another excuse to link to the superhydrophobic desktop hockey video<\/a>!), but materials that can repel organic species are much rarer. So creating a surface that is repellant to both “oil” and water<\/a> is pretty impressive. It’s all about the shape of the surface features…<\/p>\n

As people’s responses to Question 3 in Reactions<\/a> interviews are telling us, it’s All About Energy. So understanding how enzymes work – for example oxidising hydrogen – could give us clues on how to produce energy more cleanly. Which is why studying how a model of hydrogen bonding to a di-iron model of an enzyme<\/a> can reveal the role of electron-donating ligands on the spectator iron.<\/p>\n

Did you enter the Dance your PhD thesis competition?? I hope so – you can enjoy the winning entries here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Neil<\/p>\n

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry<\/a><\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s be havin\u2019 some Research Highlights.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nchem-research-highlights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}