Chemical Communications Blog

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.

Scientists in the US have described a new way of preparing gold nanoparticle superstructures with tailorable thicknesses, formed using a self-assembled gold-binding peptide conjugate template. Nathaniel Rosi and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, examined how the synthesis and assembly mechanism impacts the organization of the superstructures.

The article is free to access until the 8th of October, so why not download the article today and blog your thoughts and comments below?

A more environmentally friendly way of producing iron developed by scientists in the US and China could reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by a quarter worldwide.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, iron metal has been produced by melting iron ore at temperatures over 2000°C in a blast furnace. This produces large amounts of CO₂, which is released into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change.

The new method developed by Stuart Licht at George Washington University in Washington, DC and Baohui Wang at Northeast Petroleum University in Daqing could result in completely CO₂-free iron production. The team show that iron ores (Fe₂O₃ and Fe₃O₄) can be dissolved in molten lithium carbonate  at temperatures of around 800°C – a process that was previously thought impossible. Adding an electrical current to the molten mix separates the iron ore into its component parts, iron and oxygen, which can be collected by two electrodes in the solution.

Global carbon dioxide emissions could be cut by a quarter

Less energy is required to generate the lower temperatures and power the electrolysis, but Licht also demonstrates that these can be achieved using renewable energy. The team employ their recently developed solar technique, called solar thermal electrochemical photo (Step) – which uses the Sun’s thermal energy to melt the lithium carbonate solution while the visible light energy powers the electrolysis. Using the Step process no CO₂ is produced.

‘Step production of iron would be cost effective, and could allow iron production facilities to be housed in new geographic locations, such as in closer to urban centres or in high sunlight geographies,’ says Licht, as well as eliminating one of the major contributors to global carbon dioxide emission.

Neal Woodbury, a renewable energy expert at Arizona State University, US, comments ‘if the Step process can be performed at industrial scale, it holds considerable promise. Of particular note is that it should be possible to utilise waste heat from the processes that produce the required electricity, thus decreasing the energy input as well.’

Licht has previously shown that the Step technology can be used for carbon capture and for generating hydrogen fuel. And says he sees the scale-up of CO₂-free iron production from the laborartory to industry as an exciting challenge.

Emma Shiells

Read the whole story in the ChemComm article.

Used by many researchers in catalysis, N-Heterocyclic carbenes (NHC) can play a variety of roles in chemistry. Last month, Catherine Cazin and her co-workers at the University of St Andrews have published two articles in ChemComm, showing that their NHC complexes can be successfully used as either transfer agents or for efficiently catalysing ring closing metathesis (RCM) reactions.

The first article reports a way to easily prepare inexpensive copper synthons as NHC transfer agents to generate catalytically active gold and palladium complexes. It is the first example showing the transfer of NHC ligand from one metal centre to another. Furthermore, the resulting gold and palladium complexes are ones that are frequently used in transition metal-mediated catalysis.

The second article reports how a ruthenium-based metathesis catalyst fluctuates between trans- and cis-isomer upon heating. It is the first example of an indenylidene complex bearing monodentate (NHC and phosphite) ligands that exhibit cis-configuration.  The catalytic studies also showed that these systems are able to efficiently promote RCM reactions using very low loading levels and seem to last longer than other pre-catalysts currently used.

Both these papers are free to access until the 8th of October, so why not click on the links above, download and read the articles today!

Please feel free to blog any thoughts or comments below too!

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.

A photoelectrochemical device can successfully split water into oxygen and hydrogen, driven by the power of visible light. This offers a promising pathway to converting solar energy into a fuel, potentially solving the problems of future energy demand and related environmental issues.

 
The photoelectrochemical device consists of molecular ruthenium catalyst assembled via pH-modified Nafion on a dye-sensitized nanostructured TiO₂ film as the anode, and platinum foil as the cathode.

Want to find out more? Why not read Licheng Sun and his colleagues article today, published in Chemical Communications, it is free to access until the 17th September (2010).