Chemical Communications Blog

Large-scale fabrication of highly ordered gold nanochannel monolayers has been demonstrated by scientists in Japan. Yingpu Bi and Jinhua Ye fron the National Institute for Materials Science, in Tsukuba, have used the galvanic replacement reaction over aligned silver nanowire arrays, which can be employed as a simple and powerful cold-welding technique to make these gold nanochannels.

Why not read the article today and blog your thoughts below? Published in ChemComm, this communication is free to access until the 8th October.

Many human disorders are characterized by amyloid accumulation, in particular Alzheimer’s disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus and Parkinson’s disease. Research shows that copper enhances amyloid activity and mediates human islet amyloid polypeptide (hIAPP) oligomerization.

Yan-Mei Li and co-workers at the Tsinghua University, in China, have used copper (and nickel) to mimic these effects and it has helped shed some light on why we observe cytotoxicity for type 2 diabetes.

Curious to know more, why not download the article today and blog some comments below? Published in ChemComm, this article is free to access until the 8th October.

Millimetre-sized mesoporous carbon spheres (MMCSs) with smooth surfaces and penetrating mesoporous channels have been successfully prepared using an emulsion-EISA technique. Jianlin Shi and fellow scientists in Shanghai, China have found them to be much better bilirubin adsorbents than activated carbon spheres that are commercially available . Hemolysis and coagulation assays of MMCSs show that they have negligible hemolysis effect and do not induce blood coagulation, which means that they may be very promising for applications in practical blood perfusion.

Fancy reading more? Why not read the article here, published in ChemComm, it is free to access until the end of September or comment on the post below.

Manganese oxide nanoparticles with a hydrophilic coating show promise as a contrast agent for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) due to the nanoparticles efficient water-surface interaction resulting in prominent T1 contrast.  

Xiaoyuan Chen, at Stanford University, in the US and colleagues in China, have carried out a proof-of-concept study, where they’ve coupled the nanoparticles with ⁶⁴Cu radioisotope and performed PET/MRI dual imaging in a U87MG xenograft model. It showed good tumor accumulation for both imaging modalities.

A tag-and-modify strategy has been developed that allows the practical synthesis of homogenous fluorinated glyco-amino acids, peptides and proteins carrying a fluorine label in the sugar, allowing access to the first set of examples of directly radiolabelled ([¹⁸F]-glyco)proteins.

Benjamin G. Davis and co-workers at the University of Oxford, in the UK, have published their findings in ChemComm, where the article is free to access until the end of September. So why not download the communication today and blog any thoughts and comments below.

Scientists report a new methodology for surface modification of Teflon. The ease and efficiency of this approach and its rather robust character offer a number of interesting future perspectives.

Interested to know more? Why not download and read the article today! It’s recently been published in ChemComm and will be freely available to all, until the end of September.

Fancy submitting your own exciting, high quality research to ChemComm? Then why not email us your suggestions or upload your submission via our website.

A novel chiral triazolium salt (derived from N-heterocyclic carbene) has shown to be a potent catalyst precursor for the asymmetric cross-benzoin reaction of aldehydes with ketones. Dieter Enders and his colleagues at RWTH Aachen University, in Germany have shown that several heteroaromatic aldehydes can react successfully with various aromatic trifluoroketones in good to excellent yields, with moderate to good enantioselectivities. This could be improved (up to 99% ee) by recrystallisation.

Direct observation of the reaction by NMR along with racemisation experiments showed that the product is formed under kinetic control.

Fancy reading more? Why not download and read Dieter Enders communication today! Its recently been published in ChemComm and will be free to access until the end of September.