Category: Chemistry

I interviewed Steve Bryant for the chemistry magazine Reactive Reports, mainly about PubChem, how and why it was set up, what are its limitations, and the various controversies surrounding this chemistry database.

Bryant had become increasingly involved with information resources because, he told me, that is the most valuable thing we can do with computers and molecular databases. Making the information as accessible to researchers as possible was to be critical. “There was a whole world of information about the bio activities/properties of small molecules that was not included in our retrieval systems in as good a way as it could have been,” he says, “I thought it be worthwhile to do as it would have a major impact on research.”

Read the complete interview in the March 2006 edition of Reactive Reports.

When it comes to particles, we usually think of opposites attracting – north and south, positive and negative. But, somehow particles that one might expect to mutually repel somehow manage to form clusters in solution. How this can be was the subject of a research project undertaken by Gerhard Kahl of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Vienna University of Technology, and colleagues. Their finding could be important for understanding how polymers become organized and improve the prospects of the burgeoning field of soft matter research.

Get the complete picture in the March issue of chemistry webzine ReactiveReports.com

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.