Chemical Communications Blog

Ammonia gas diffusion basis for inexpensive colour-changing food freshness label.

Source: Royal Society of Chemistry

Ever rummaged through the fridge and wondered, ’Is this meat still ok to eat?’ A cheap colour-changing label can now help answer this question.

Most commercial indicators that help customers evaluate their food’s freshness, such as MonitorMark and Timestrip, are expensive to manufacture or must to be stored at very low temperatures in order to prevent them from going off before being placed on the food. A new indicator developed by Andrew Mills and his team at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, overcomes these problems as it is made from very cheap materials, can be stored at room temperature, and activated when and where it’s needed.

Read the full story by Abigail Hallowes in Chemistry World.

This article is free to access until 25 January 2017.

A. Mills et al, Chem. Commun., 2016, 52, 13987. DOI: 10.1039/C6CC07906G

On 28 November 2016, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society Publications Division, ACS Publications, both signed the ORCID Open Letter committing to unambiguous identification of all authors that publish in our journals.

The official press release can be found here: http://rsc.li/orcid

In brief, this partnership with ORCID will resolve ambiguity in researcher identification caused by name changes, cultural differences in name presentation, and the inconsistent use of name abbreviations, thereby ensuring their contributions are appropriately recognized and credited.

In celebration of Peer Review Week, with the theme of Recognition for Review, we would like to highlight the top 10 reviewers for ChemComm in 2016, as selected by the editor for their significant contribution to the journal.

Top 10 Reviewers for ChemComm:
– Dr Xuehai Yan – Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany
– Dr Yong Wang – Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center, USA
– Dr Cheng Wang – Xiamen University, China
– Dr Tieru Zhang – Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, China
– Dr Jie Wu – National University of Singapore, Singapore
– Dr Guocan Yu – Zhejiang University, China
– Dr Xiangbing Qi – National Institute of Biological Science Beijing, China
– Dr Yong Li – University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA
– Dr Youjun Yang – East China University of Science and Technology, China
– Professor Martin Albrecht – University of Bern, Switzerland

We would like to say a massive thank you to these reviewers as well as the ChemComm board and all of the chemistry community for their continued support of the journal, as authors, reviewers and readers.

Two separate groups of scientists have developed methods to uncover proteins’ 3D structure inside living animal cells for the first time.

It is vital to know the structure of a protein to understand its chemical and biological functions. Scientists usually need to purify and crystallise a protein to determine its 3D structure by x-ray crystallography. Not only is this process difficult and lengthy, it can also misrepresent the protein’s structure, as the measuring conditions are vastly different from the conditions inside a living cell.

Now, a researcher team led by Xun-Cheng Su from Nankai University in Tianjin, China,Conggang Li at Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Thomas Huber from the Australian National University, has analysed a protein’s structure using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy inside living frog cells.1 The researchers tagged the protein with a beacon, a paramagnetic lanthanide tag, which binds to a cysteine residue on the outside of the protein. ‘The measured effects from the beacons tagged onto the protein give away the positions of the atoms in the protein, in a similar way that a set of satellites can be used to locate the exact position of a GPS receiver,’ Su explains.

Read the full article on Chemistry World >>>

A team of scientists has discovered the first interactions between neon and a transition metal. Their discovery opens up the possibility of new methods to capture the inert gas, as well as other unreactive elements such as helium.

Although it’s found in advertising and eye-catching signage, neon is also incorporated into lasers used in the photolithographic printing of semiconductors. Neon is abundant in the universe, but its inert nature means that it escapes the Earth’s atmosphere. The noble gas is also hard to isolate. Current methods involve liquefying air and distilling the gas in a liquid form – an expensive and inefficient approach.

A team led by Peter Wood at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, UK, has discovered that, under particular conditions, the inert gas interacts with a transition metal. Not only is this the first interaction ever observed, but it may kick-start new approaches in capturing unreactive noble gases.

Read the full article in Chemistry World >>>

Chemists mask amines’ unwanted reactivity with carbon dioxide and overcome limitations of amide formation

Chemists at Imperial College London, UK, have overcome limitations that afflict a specific class of amidation reactions, used to produce a range of compounds from drugs to valuable materials. Their simple trick was to add carbon dioxide, which masks the reagent’s reactivity, making sure it only reacts when they want it to.

Read the full article in Chemistry World >>>