Chemistry

Chemists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Arizona State University have proposed an elegantly simple technique for cleaving proteins into convenient pieces for analysis. The prototype sample preparation method, detailed recently in Analytical Chemistry,* uses ultraviolet light and titanium dioxide and could be ideal for new microfluidic “lab-on-a-chip” devices designed to rapidly analyze minute amount of biological samples. Illustration of the cleavage of proteins near a titanium dioxide surface: when illuminated with ultraviolet light, hydroxyl radicals…

The Virginia Tech chemistry research group that has been creating molecular complexes that use solar energy to produce hydrogen from water has added an additional capacity to their supramolecule. Karen Brewer, professor of chemistry, explains that the new, more robust molecules still harness light and covert it to chemical energy by splitting water to produce hydrogen. “What is different is the way the systems function. It is a three part molecule. The first part is a light absorber, harnessing visible and UV light. The second part is an electron reservoir. The third part is the catalysis to…

Ladybugs may look pretty but they also have a dark side. In some places, the polka-dotted insects have become a nuisance by invading homes and crops, including some vineyards. To make matters worse, the bugs produce a foul-smelling liquid that, besides irritating homeowners, can be inadvertently processed along with grapes and taint the aroma and flavor of wine. Now, chemists at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, say they have identified several compounds that are responsible for the ladybug’s noxious odor, a finding that could lead to new strategies to detect and eliminate the offensive…

Craftsmen tile walls or floors by hand; but how can you get an ordered monolayer onto a substrate when the "tiles" are microscopically small instead of big and easy to handle? Previously, self-assembly processes have been the method of choice for this scale. Korean researchers have now come to the realization that even such tiny components can be arranged in a "do-it-yourself" method. As they describe in the journal Angewandte Chemie, their manually produced monolayers of microcrystals are qualitatively superior to the self-assembled variety. How small can components be such that they can…

Ultrasonic irradiation can break down ionic liquids into more environmentally benign compounds, say scientists. Ionic liquids are widely regarded as a greener alternative to many commonly used solvents. But, concerns about their toxicity have raised questions about their use in large scale industrial applications, especially those that involve the creation of large amounts of waste. High frequency sound waves break ionic liquids into non-toxic components. Image: Chemical Science A team of researchers at the South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, and the University of Reading, UK…

I realize that the audience for this blog tends to be more broad based than on UsefulChem but once in a while I'll throw in an organic chemistry puzzle to see if there are any organic chemists out there lurking. Ever since we isolated our Ugi products, we've been trying to cyclize them to the diketopiperazines. As described by Hulme, we are trying to effect an intramolecular transamidation catalyzed by trifluoroacetic acid (TFA). Instead of dichloroethane we are generally using CDCl3 so that we can monitor the reaction by NMR. The first step of removing the boc group seems to proceed very…

Last week I had the pleasure of getting interviewed by Janet Babin at the WHYY studio in Philly. Janet is putting together a piece on Open Notebook/Open Source Science for her Marketplace series on NPR. It was encouraging to see how much interest is being generated on this topic lately, especially in the popular media. If you have listened to her pieces, such as the one on MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, you would appreciate the pains to which she goes to provide a balanced perspective. So it was interesting to see the issues that she asked me to address, based on her interviews with other…

The way people search for and find chemistry information is always in flux. Right now, Open Access is a hot topic (e.g. Open Source Archivangelism post) and it is interesting to see how those seeking OA sources are connecting with those who choose to share information in that way. This morning I noticed from our SiteMeter referrals that someone had found some of our experiments (EXP019) involving anisaldehyde by doing a Google search with the advanced features set to include only documents with usage rights set to "free to use or share". A nice benefit of using Wikispaces as our lab…

The chemical bond between carbon and fluorine is one of the strongest in nature, and has been both a blessing and a curse in the complex history of fluorocarbons. Now, in a powerful demonstration of the relatively new field of "computational chemistry," researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Interdisciplinary Network of Emerging Science and Technology group (INEST, sponsored by Philip Morris USA) have designed—in a computer—a wholly theoretical molecule to pull the fluorine out of fluorocarbons.* Postmortem: Computer modeling rendition of the…

The safest possible future for advancing nanotechnology in a sustainable world can be reached by using green chemistry, says James E. Hutchison, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon. “Around the world, there is a growing urgency about nanotechnology and its possible health and environmental impacts,” Hutchison said in his talk Sunday during a workshop at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “There is a concern that these issues will hinder commercialization of this industry.” Scientists need to take a proactive approach to advancing…