RSC Advances Blog

Graphene and platinum are brought together for fuel cells

Sara Coles, Guest Web-Writer — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:00:23 +0000

Graphene is certainly a hot topic in research right now. A quick look down this very blog shows that it featured in no fewer than seven of the top ten accessed articles in RSC Advances during 2012 (including all of the top three)!

This versatile material appears as oxides, composites, quantum dots, nanomaterials and foams and it has been investigated for uses in photocatalysis, energy, environmental applications and more.

Now researchers in India and China have been investigating graphene supported platinum catalysts for fuel cells.

Sreekuttan M. Unni and colleagues report the first synthesis of a 3D self-assembled single crystalline platinum nanostructure directly on a graphene surface without structural directing agents, by using a slow reduction method. In their paper, they show superior electrocatalytic activity towards the oxygen reduction reaction, a crucial reaction for hydrogen-fuelled polymer electrolyte fuel cells. They show that their material also has less vulnerability to strong hydroxyl adsorption and a higher limiting current density than other graphene supported platinum or commercial platinum-on-carbon catalysts.

Meanwhile Jian Zhao and colleagues have published about their supercritical fluid route for preparing graphene-supported platinum-ruthenium nanoparticles in an effective, simple, low temperature and environmentally benign way. They used supercritical CO₂to uniformly distribute ultrafine PtRu nanoparticles with an average size of 2.87 nm on the surfaces of functionalized graphene sheets. They found considerably improved catalytic activity and stability for methanol oxidation from their supported nanoparticles because of the uniform distribution. Their supercritical approach may have promise for development of direct methanol fuel cells.

Find out more about this research in RSC Advances:

3-Dimensionally self-assembled single crystalline platinum nanostructures on few-layer graphene as an efficient oxygen reduction electrocatalyst, Sreekuttan M. Unni, Vijayamohanan K. Pillai and Sreekumar Kurungot, RSC Adv., 2013, 3, 6913-6921

Methanol electrocatalytic oxidation on highly dispersed platinum–ruthenium/graphene catalysts prepared in supercritical carbon dioxide–methanol solution, Jian Zhao, Lin Zhang, Hao Xue, Zhaobo Wang and Haiqing Hu, RSC Adv., 2012, 2, 9651–9659

14th EuCheMS International Conference on Chemistry and the Environment

Mary Badcock, Deputy Editor — Tue, 07 May 2013 09:44:23 +0000

The 14th EuCheMS International Conference on Chemistry and the Environment (ICCE 2013) is to be held in Barcelona from the 25-28 June 2013.

The main aims of ICCE 2013 are:

To link pioneering research with existing and up-coming environmental issues
To discuss fundamental and applicable aspects related to the fate of chemicals in the environment
To generate awareness for emerging contaminants

The scientific programme will feature contributions in the following topics:

Atmospheric Chemistry and Aerosols
Soil and Sediment Pollution, Wastes
Water Pollution and Treatment
(Eco-)Toxicology: Pollutants Exposure and Effects on Biota and Ecosystems
Modelling, Management and Risk Assessment
Transformation and Fate of Pollutants
Green and Sustainable Industrial Chemistry
Emerging Pollutants

Register for ICCE 2013 today through the conference website - online registration ends 1 June 2013.

Creative assemblies for targeted drug delivery

Mary Badcock, Deputy Editor — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:30:58 +0000

Stimuli-responsive assemblies have generated a lot of interest in recent years especially in view of their biological applications. Enzyme-responsive assemblies for controlled drug release have gained particular interest as this offers potentially selective and targeted delivery of therapeutics.

A team of scientists from Nankai University (China) led by Yu Liu have fabricated a supramolecular assembly based on the host-guest complexation of amphiphillic calixarene with adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Complextion of the calixarene with ATP markedly lowers it’s critical aggregation concentration, forming hollow spherical nanoparticles. The nanospheres were shown to be responsive to phosphatase – an enzyme over-expressed in many tumor cells - and thus may have applications in drug delivery and cancer therapy.

Read the full article for free until the 24th May 2013:

Phosphatase-responsive amphiphilic calixarene assembly, Yi-Xuan Wang, Dong-Sheng Guo, Yu Caoa and Yu Liu, RSC Adv., 2013, DOI: 10.1039/C3RA40453F

RSC Grants for the 44th IUPAC World Chemistry Congress

Mary Badcock, Deputy Editor — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:44:01 +0000

The RSC are delighted to be able to provide £400 bursaries for ten UK-based PhD student and early career researcher members to participate in the 44^th IUPAC World Chemistry Congress in Istanbul, Turkey, between the 11^th and 16^th August 2013.

The main topic of this year’s congress is “Clean Energy Through Chemistry”. Speakers include Daniel Nocera from Harvard and Martin Quack from ETH Zurich. For more details, please see http://www.iupac2013.org/.

To apply for this grant, please complete the application form (my.rsc.org/content/images/Science/IUPAC-application.pdf) and include a copy of your CV by noon on Friday the 26^th April. Applications should be sent to science@rsc.org. Please note that the registration deadline for IUPAC 2013 is the 30^th April. Members wishing to apply for an RSC grant will also need to register for the congress via the IUPAC 2013 website (http://www.iupac2013.org/abstract_submissions.asp).

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email science@rsc.org.

Energy storage of the future?

Sara Coles, Guest Web-Writer — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:00:21 +0000

Supercapacitors, also known as electrochemical capacitors, are used as highly reliable energy storage devices with the advantage of rapid charge and discharge compared to batteries. However to further expand their use it is necessary to improve their performance in other areas including energy density.

Ruthenium oxide is the material widely used for supercapacitor electrodes. Its use is reviewed by Wentao Deng and colleagues in China and the UK, in a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in this area.

Work has not stopped on improving the performance of these highly promising devices – far from it. Just to take a couple of examples, Sho Makino and colleagues from Japan have used nanostructured ruthenium oxide in an aqueous hybrid supercapacitor with a specific energy comparable to modern rechargeable batteries, opening the possibility of using these materials in a post-lithium ion battery technology. Meanwhile Beena Balan and colleagues from India have looked at decorating carbon nanotubes with ruthenium oxide to produce a ternary electrode material to increase the specific capacitance by 103%, with enhanced rate and excellent electrochemical stability.

Read more about this valuable research in RSC Advances – free to access for 4 weeks:

Electrochemical capacitors utilising transition metal oxides: an update of recent developments, Wentao Deng, Xiaobo Ji, Qiyuan Chen and Craig E. Banks, RSC Adv., 2011, 1, 1171

4 V class aqueous hybrid electrochemical capacitor with battery-like capacity,Sho Makino, Yuto Shinohara, Takayuki Ban, Wataru Shimizu, Keita Takahashi, Nobuyuki Imanishib and Wataru Sugimoto, RSC Adv., 2012, 2, 12144

Carbon nanofiber–RuO2–poly(benzimidazole) ternary hybrids for improved supercapacitor performance, Beena K Balan, Harshal D Chaudhari, Ulhas K Kharul and Sreekumar Kurungot, RSC Adv., 2013, 3, 2428

Electron-conjugation facilitates electron transfer of hemoglobin by Ce(OH)3 nanorods

Mary Badcock, Deputy Editor — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:32:26 +0000

Scientists from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing, China) led by Kebin Zhou investigated the interaction between nanorods of Ce(OH)₃ and CeO₂ and the redox protein hemoglobin.

The nano-bio interfaces, such as those between inorganic nanomaterials and biological systems, are gaining a significant amount of interest due to their importance in biomedical applications, but also out of concerns over the bio-safety of nano-engineered particles. In the case of ceria-based nanomaterials, some studies have found they were able to prevent the increase of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in vitro and in vivo due to the existence of Ce³⁺. However, others have found that some of these materials could actually generate ROS and cause toxicity to cells as Ce⁴⁺ is reduced to Ce³⁺.

In this work, Zhou and co-workers hydrothermally prepared Ce(OH)₃ and CeO₂ nanorods and studied their interaction with a typical redox protein hemoglobin through an electrochemical method combined with Electron Paramagnetic Resonance spectroscopy. Ce(OH)₃ was found to be more efficient in enhancing the direct electron-transfer of hemoglobin which may be due to the strong electron-conjugation interaction.

Read the full article for free until the 7th May 2013.

Strong electron-conjugation interaction facilitates electron transfer of hemoglobin by Ce(OH)₃nanorods, Lei Wang, Qingfen Luan, Dan Yang, Xin Yao and Kebin Zhou, RSC Adv., 2013, DOI: 10.1039/C3RA40336J

Nucleic Acids: new life, new materials – web themed issue now published!

Mary Badcock, Deputy Editor — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 08:45:04 +0000

Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, ChemComm and RSC Advances are delighted to announce the publication of a timely web collection on:

Nucleic Acids: new life, new materials

Guest-edited by:

Michael Gait (MRC, Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK)	Nadrian Seeman (New York University, USA)
Makoto Komiyama (University of Tsukuba, Japan)	Oliver Seitz (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)
David Liu (Harvard University, USA)	Jason Mickelfield (University of Manchester, UK)

Through over 70 communications, full papers, feature articles and perspectives, this collection guides the reader through the most recent and exciting findings in nucleic acids research and applications in emerging areas.

Some of the work presented in this virtual collection is also dedicated to the memory of Professor Har Gobind Khorana (1922 – 2011) and Dr Daniel McGillivray Brown (1923 – 2012) acknowledging their legacy to the nucleic acids community.

“The ingenuity of nucleic acids chemists is formidable, particularly in the newly emerging areas involving DNA architecture combined with novel chemical modifications and material composites. This web collection nicely showcases this potential.”
… Read this and more in the guest-editors’ Editorial for the issue.

As a taster, this collection of articles includes:

Pyridostatin analogues promote telomere dysfunction and long-term growth inhibition in human cancer cells
Sebastian Müller, Deborah A. Sanders, Marco Di Antonio, Stephanos Matsis, Jean-François Riou, Raphaël Rodriguez and Shankar Balasubramanian
Org. Biomol. Chem., DOI: 10.1039/C2OB25830G, Paper

A clocked finite state machine built from DNA
Cristina Costa Santini, Jonathan Bath, Andy M. Tyrrell and Andrew J. Turberfield
Chem. Commun., DOI: 10.1039/C2CC37227D

Theoretical model of substrate-assisted self-assembly of DNA nanostructures
Shogo Hamada and Satoshi Murata
RSC Adv., DOI: 10.1039/C2RA20764H

Reduction of metal ions by boranephosphonate DNA
Subhadeep Roy, Magdalena Olesiak, Petra Padar, Heather McCuen and Marvin H. Caruthers
Org. Biomol. Chem., DOI: 10.1039/C2OB26661J

Dehydration from conserved stem regions is fundamental for ligand-dependent conformational transition of the adenine-specific riboswitch
Vinit Kumar, Tamaki Endoh, Kentaro Murakami and Naoki Sugimoto
Chem. Commun., DOI: 10.1039/C2CC34506D

DNA glycoclusters and DNA-based carbohydrate microarrays: From design to applications
François Morvan, Sébastien Vidal, Eliane Souteyrand, Yann Chevolot and Jean-Jacques Vasseur
RSC Adv., DOI: 10.1039/C2RA21550K

The bacterial second messenger c-di-GMP: probing interactions with protein and RNA binding partners using cyclic dinucleotide analogs
Carly A. Shanahan and Scott A. Strobel
Org. Biomol. Chem., DOI: 10.1039/C2OB26724A

A DNA based five-state switch with programmed reversibility
Jonathan R. Burns, Søren Preus, Daniel G. Singleton and Eugen Stulz
Chem. Commun., DOI: 10.1039/C2CC35799B

Two-photon excitation of the fluorescent nucleobase analogues 2-AP and tC
R. S. K. Lane and S. W. Magennis
RSC Adv., DOI: 10.1039/C2RA21881J

…and many more.

We hope that you will find this collection enjoyable and stimulating to read!

Please feel free to send the link to the issue to other researchers who you think may be interested.