Congratulations to Sajesh Thomas from Bangalore, India and Christophe Vande Velde based in Antwerp in Belgium, recent winners of the CrystEngComm poster prizes at the IUCr Congress in Madrid which took place from the 22-30 August this year.
The prizes were presented to Sajesh and Christophe by CrystEngComm Advisory Board member Catalina Ruiz Perez. The winners each received an RSC book, a subscription to CrystEngComm and a CrystEngComm poster prize certificate.
Sajesh’s poster was entitled ‘Observation of a Conserved ‘Selenium Bond Synthon’ Involving Se…O Interaction’ and Christophe presented a poster on ‘Non-centrosymmetric Molecules – Centrosymmetric Structure?’
I was also in attendance at this busy meeting packed with excellent posters and talks on a huge range of topics from the field of crystal engineering and crystallography. I had a fantastic time at this well organised congress and arrived back with some IUCr mugs to remind me of the conference! CrystEngComm Webwriter Claire Murray was also in beautiful Madrid at the event so look out for her report on her congress experience – coming soon to the CrystEngComm blog……
Check out more recent conference news here
In this CrystEngComm Hot article Zhimao Yang and co-workers from Xi’an Jiaotong University make copper oxide nanostructures with copper nanoparticles grown on the {111} facets via a one-pot method.
Water contamination by synthetic organic chemicals is a burgeoning global problem due to the difficult degradation of these materials. Bismuth vanadate (BiVO4) has been identified as promising photocatalyst for environmental applications because of its stability in water without altering the pH value. A very low band gap of 2.4 keV also means there is potential to activate BiVO4 by visible light. The formation of good crystals with few structural defects and preferred facets is essential to the optimisation of these processes.
Check out this Chemistry World review by Karen McLuskey of Crystals, x-rays and proteins. Comprehensive protein crystallography by Dennis Sherwood and Jon Cooper