Category: Chemistry

The crystal structure of the anthelmintic drug praziquantel used to treat schistosomiasis (also known as bilharziasis or snail fever), has been determined by researchers in Singapore. Their study used the thermal properties of the drug, including melting point phase diagram and solubility, to determine the optimum conditions to allow them to separate its isomers chromatographically and to find the best approach to crystallisation. Such research could lead to improved drugs to treat parasitic infections.

Read on…

ChemWeb’s Alchemist gets cracking with an alternative approach to gasoline production from The Netherlands, finds out how to protect fashion-conscious athletes from impact injuries, checks out the soft core particle scene, and discovers a possible mechanism for how diabetes drugs work. Also in this weeks musings, we hear that French researchers have carried out the first experiments to measure how heat flow behaves far from a heated surface, which could help us understand not only something as mundane as the interior of a star but also air conditioning units!

Researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich have grown particles of a mosaic virus that infects black-eyed peas and dressed them up with a redox-active organometallic compound* to convert the particles into nanoscopic molecular capacitors.

The virus, which is only harmful to black-eyed, or cowpea plants, has a unique structure making it the perfect scaffold for chemical modification, allowing the team to tailor its chemical and physical properties to particular applications.

‘This is an exciting discovery in bionanotechnology using plant viruses to produce electronically active nanoparticles of defined size’ says graduate student Nicole Steinmetz, who is working on the EU-funded project with project leader David Evans and George Lomonossoff of the Department of Biological Chemistry. ‘Future applications may be in, for example, biosensors, nanoelectronic devices, and electrocatalytic processes,’ she adds.

The project is still in the very early stages, by the JIC considered it newsworthy enough to publish a press release today and capitalise on the popularity of young people’s popular music beat combo the Black-eyed Peas, and never one to miss out on an opportunity for catching a few new readers, particularly among the youth of today, Sciencebase is getting down with it, to give it a mention too.

The work was published in detail in the journal ‘Small’ and is, the press release says, the first piece of nanotechnology from the John Innes Centre.

Meanwhile, if you want more on the business of nanotech, you might wish to subscribe to Small Times, which you can get for free for a year through this special Sciencebase link. Grab it while you can, as these magazines sometimes drop off the roster.

*240 units of a ferrocenecarboxylate, in fact.

Working chemists would much prefer to be left to their own devices to come up with names for the compounds they discover. Names that trip off the tongue, names that twist it. Names that honour colleagues, the famous, home towns and occasionally slime moulds are all much nicer than sticking to the rules. So what’s in a name? as the man asked, and why shouldn’t we keep it trivial?

Read my cynical take on all that is systematic and all that is trivial in the world of chemical nomenclature

In my latest news round-up on spectroscopynow, we report on new materials based on cross-linking polymers have been shown to swell and contract in a controlled way depending on temperature an pH. The researchers used various analytical techniques to track the syntheses of these materials and their behaviour, including proton NMR, XPS (X-ray photoemission spectroscopy), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy.

Such smart gels may have applications in tissue engineering and drug delivery.

High-speed observations of hydrogen ions (protons) moving within a molecule could allow chemists to gain new insights into the fundamental processes that take place in reactions, according to UK scientists writing in the journal Science today.

John Tisch of Imperial College London and his colleagues have captured proton movements on the attosecond scale. (Check out our atto to yocto page for a definition). The research provides new clues as to how molecules behave in chemical and biological processes.

“Slicing up a second into intervals as miniscule as 100 attoseconds, as our new technique enables us to do, is extremely hard to conceptualise,” says Tisch, “It’s like chopping up the 630 million kilometres from here to Jupiter into pieces as wide as a human hair.”

Jon Marangos, Director of the Blackett Laboratory Laser Consortium at Imperial, adds that the new technique means scientists will now be able to measure and control the ultra-fast dynamics of molecules. “Control of this kind underpins an array of future technologies, such as control of chemical reactions, quantum computing and high brightness x-ray light sources for material processing. We now have a much clearer insight into what is happening within molecules and this allows us to carry out more stringent testing of theories of molecular structure and motion. This is likely to lead to improved methods of molecular synthesis and the nano-fabrication of a new generation of materials,” explains Marangos.

To make the breakthrough, the scientists, include lead author Sarah Baker, used a specially built laser system capable of producing extremely brief bursts of light. This pulsed light has an oscillating electrical field that exerts a powerful force on the electrons surrounding the protons, repeatedly tearing them from the molecule and driving them back into it. This process causes the electrons to carry a large amount of energy, which they release as an x-ray photon before returning to their original state. How bright this x-ray is depends on how far the protons move in the time between the electrons’ removal and return. The further the proton moves, the lower the intensity of the x-ray, allowing the team to measure how far a proton has moved during the electron oscillation period.

You can read more about the research in today’s issue of Science