Cheminformatics could help save forests from the damage caused by runaway widlfires. As long as there have been forests, there have been forest fires, from the bushfires of the Australian outback, across Africa, Asia, and Europe, to the Americas. Such fires often thought of has having a regenerative effect on old woodland, but predictions of an increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires because of climate change could lead to loss of forest and soil erosion rather than dendritic rebirth. Spanish researchers have now used near infrared spectroscopy, a simple calibration technique and cheminformatics analysis of their spectra to determine a key parameter of soil damage – the MTR, or maximum temperature reached. You can read the full story in the latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW.
Category: Chemspy
Archived articles from my old Chemspy website. No longer updated.
Digg for Chemists
Berkeley chemist Mitch Garcia, who runs ChemicalForums.com has come up with a “novel” way to evaluate the chemical literature that will complement current ways of evaluating a particular paper. At the moment, the only way to determine whether a particular experiment is valid are to trust the quality of the peer review process for the particular journal in question, attempt to repeat the experiment yourself, check out how many other chemists are citing the paper, or somehow try to relate the quality of the paper to the author’s h-index, an altogether more ephemeral and perhaps elitist quality.
Garcia has now launched ChemRank, which will augment this unwieldy process by allowing individuals to post a reference and then see others vote on whether or not the paper in question is any good or not. Those papers with the most votes will rise to the top, while the less worthy will essentially sink. The system will rely on building a big enough userbase and somehow ensuring that chemists don’t simply spam their own papers or vote arbitrarily for their friends and Profs. How effective Garcia’s system will be remains to be seen as it has only just launched. The number of papers currently being voted on is small and the number of votes is low, so take a look and if you feel like digging chemistry, make your vote count.
Chemrefer Chemspider Coupled
A mash up between Chemrefer, the search engine for open access chemistry papers, and molecular structure search engine Chemspider launched today. I have to confess to playing no small part in facilitating this collaboration having introduced the Chemspider team, virtually speaking, to the owner of Chemrefer, Will Griffiths, who was a Reactive Profilee in June 2006. You can access the chemical mash up here. Search for any term of interest and the new hybrid tool will return all the pertinent results that are available for instant free access from the journal publishers. There are something like 50000 papers accessible this way via a search of more than 14.5million+ chemical entities.
Chemists Pull Rank
The RSC recently published a league table showing the top-ranking, living chemists. The league is based on the so-called h-index. This parameter was devised by Jorge Hirsch in 2005 in order to measure the impact of an individual chemist’s research. Put simply, the h-index is equal to the highest number of papers that chemist has published which have gained at least that number of citations from other authors. According to the Chemistry World Blog today, thirty more chemists have been added to the league. Hirsch argued that the h-index avoids bias by combining total published papers with a citation parameter it does not reward the prolific but mediocre. The original league was created by Henry Schaefer and colleagues manually by trawling ISI citation data, but I am sure an intrepid chemical web student could create a suitable script to do the job automatically.
Nanotechnology Used to Enter Plant Cells
US scientists are using nanotechnology to penetrate plant cell walls and deliver a gene and a chemical triggers with great precision. The work could lead to a powerful new tool for targeted delivery into plant cells.
The research is highlighted in the May issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Kan Wang of Iowa State University and his colleagues point out that introducing a gene into a plant cell is possible but chemical activation usuall involves an imprecise and separate process that may be toxic to the plant.
“With the mesoporous nanoparticles, we can deliver two biogenic species at the same time,” Wang said. “We can bring in a gene and induce it in a controlled manner at the same time and at the same location. That’s never been done before.”
The controlled release will improve the ability to study gene function in plants. And in the future, scientists could use the new technology to deliver imaging agents or chemicals inside cell walls. This would provide plant biologists with a window into intracellular events.
Lin’s porous, silica nanosphere system has arrays of independent porous channels, which form a honeycomb-like structure that can be filled with chemicals. “One gram of this kind of material can have a total surface area of a football field, making it possible to carry a large payload,” Trewyn said.
Organic Lectures Reach Drexel Island
Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University has taken his second life persona to his professional bosom and is now providing organic chemistry students not only with obelisks on the dragon-shaped island of Drexel (Drexopia, perhaps?), but they can now see organic chemistry lectures there too. It is an incredibly innovative use of SL, but I wonder whether students are going to feel like they are being monitored not only in the real world of university lecture rooms and study areas, but in the escapist virtual spaces of SL too. Scary thought.
DBPedia for Chemists
Cambridge chemist Peter Murray-Rust recently alerted me to the DBpedia service. DBpedia.org is a community effort to extract structured information (semantics) from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated questions of Wikipedia rather than carrying out simple searches. “DBPedia is a semantic distillate of Wikipedia and soon all the chemistry will be in semantic form,” asserts Murray-Rust, “It will then be possible to ask questions like: “find compounds which were discovered by a Russian chemist in the 19th Century”. That is a simplistic example, of course. He believes that such efforts form part of a new information philosophy of linked data and points out that Open chemical resources, such as Pubchem, DBPedia, CrystalEye, ChEBI, etc. will soon become part of that philosophy.
Chemspy Blog Archived
Having run the Chemspy RSS feed manually for rather too long, we have finally upgraded to a CMS that enables a much slicker interface and will hopefully benefit readers considerably by providing easier access to the site news and our new chemistry news section. As such, earlier ChemSpy posts have now been archived as a standalone static page and can be accessed through the Chemspy chemistry news archives page here.
UPDATE: All chemistry items that would have originally been earmarked for inclusion in Chemspy will now appear in Sciencebase.com