Green Chemistry Blog

Screenshot of the Green Solvents App for iPad

Several new mobile applications (Apps) have been recently released for the Apple iOS platform which incorporate green chemistry concepts. This represents a highly novel way to communicate science and bring green chemistry to a bigger audience, which has not previously been appreciated. We certainly sense there is an untapped audience for these types of applications due to the large number of people who now own a mobile device across all demographics. Green Chemistry related information is generally proprietary and papers on the topic are commonly behind paywalls. Making the information freely available or at low cost is a paradigm shift.

For example, a recent consortium organized by the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute^TM (ACS GCI) Pharmaceutical Roundtable¹ currently involves 14 pharmaceutical companies, and has developed a solvent selection guide that is publicly available on their website in the form of a PDF file.² We have made this solvent selection guide more accessible in the form of a free app called Green Solvents.^{3, 4} It is delivered as a simple structure look-up guide incorporating all of the selection criteria from the ACS GCI and, in addition, having links out to other useful resources (ChemSpider ^5-7 etc.). This app, like most free apps, has a small banner advertisement which does not detract from the content of the app or its usability on a mobile device. Importantly this App was not funded by the ACS or any other organization.

Screenshot of the Open Drug Discovery Teams App for iPad

Creating the Green Solvents app has also motivated the addition of the process mass intensity (PMI) calculation⁸ (which is another green chemistry feature), into the Yield101 app⁹. A third recently developed mobile app connected to green chemistry is the Open Drug Discovery Teams (ODDT) app^{10, 11}. ODDT is a free mobile app intended as a research topic aggregator of science data collected from various sources on the internet such as Twitter and Google Alerts. It exists to facilitate interdisciplinary teamwork and deliver access to information that is highly relevant and focused on the topic areas of interest. Research topics include areas of chemistry and adjacent molecule-oriented biomedical sciences, with an emphasis on those which are most amenable to open research at present. We have focused on green chemistry as a topic due to its potential importance for scientists involved in drug discovery for rare and neglected diseases. There is high attrition in drug discovery, so many compounds will need to be made but only a very small fraction will make it into the clinic and, far less, into the marketplace. It is therefore important to design a green process as early as possible when the cost is lower and the quantities of chemicals made are relatively small compared to when they are dramatically scaled up for manufacturing. We feel these global neglected and rare disease researchers would benefit greatly from being informed about green chemistry principles early on and that this has not been considered by any of the major organizations driving green chemistry initiatives. This app has also been used to visualize the ACS GCI solvent selection guide in a different format as it was Tweeted out to reach an even wider audience for those following the hashtag #greenchemistry. To date we are the only researchers that have created and used mobile apps to communicate green chemistry concepts. We feel this is an area that is ripe for expansion to further educate scientists.

Sean Ekins^*
Collaborations in Chemistry, 5616 Hilltop Needmore Road, Fuquay-Varina, NC 27526, U.S.A.
Alex M. Clark
Molecular Materials Informatics, 1900 St. Jacques #302, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3J 2S1
Antony J. Williams
Royal Society of Chemistry, 904 Tamaras Circle, Wake Forest, NC 27587, U.S.A. 

1. American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute^TM Pharmaceutical Roundtable www.acs.org/gcipharmaroundtable
2. Solvent selection guide. http://surveys.acs.org/se.ashx?s=04BD76CC0E5496A7
3. Ekins, S. Green Solvents: From Idea to App in 3 Days. http://www.slideshare.net/ekinssean/green-solvents-app
4. Clark, A. M. Green Solvents. http://www.scimobileapps.com/index.php?title=Green_Solvents
5. ChemSpider. www.chemspider.com
6. Pence, H. E.; Williams, A. J. ChemSpider: An Online Chemical Information Resource. J Chem Educ 2010, 87, 1123-1124.
7. Williams, A. J. Public chemical compound databases. Curr Opin Drug Discov Devel 2008, 11, 393-404.
8. ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable. http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_TRANSITIONMAIN&node_id=1422&use_sec=false&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=46aca9b6-a985-42cd-a534-7d6cabf892a7
9. Clark, A. M. Yield-101. http://www.scimobileapps.com/index.php?title=Yield101
10. Ekins, S.; Clark, A. M.; Williams, A. J. Open Drug Discovery Teams: A Chemistry Mobile App for Collaboration. Molecular Informatics 2012, In Press.
11. Philippidis, A. App connects rare disease researchers to data. http://www.genengnews.com/insight-and-intelligenceand153/app-connects-rare-disease-researchers-to-data/77899637/

Green Chemistry Issue 11 is now online. The cover features work from Jairton Dupont and co-workers from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. They show that a dicyclohexylguanidine group covalently attached on silica gel is an efficient basic heterogeneous catalyst for the production of biodiesel in a continuous flow reactor. Find out more by reading the full article ‘Silica-supported guanidine catalyst for continuous flow biodiesel production’.

The inside front cover highlights a paper from Alexander Bismark and colleagues at Imperial College London in which frothing of acrylated epoxidised soybean oil (AESO) followed by microwave initiated polymerisation is used to make bacterial cellulose reinforced polyAESO nanocomposite foams. The introduction of Bacterial Cellulose significantly enhanced the stability of the gas-soybean oil foam templates and enhanced the mechanical properties of the polymer nanocomposite foams. Find out more by reading the full article ‘Bio-based macroporous polymer nanocomposites made by mechanical frothing of acrylated epoxidised soybean oil’.

These cover articles are free for all to access until December 15th.

Rafael Luque discusses funding for early stage researchers and the importance of green chemistry with Anna Simpson

Rafael Luque is the Ramon y Cajal fellow at the University of Cordoba in Spain. His interests range from materials science, nanotechnology and heterogeneous catalysis to biomass valorisation and biofuels.

How did you get to where you are today? 

I was always fascinated by chemistry because it’s in everything. This table that we are sitting at is chemistry! 

I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Cordoba in Spain and I was delighted to receive a grant to do my PhD in the organic chemistry department there. I started to have my own ideas and in pursuing them, my supervisors were always happy. It all worked out really well in the end! 

During my PhD, I spent six months at the green chemistry centre of excellence at the University of York in the UK. I worked with Duncan Macquarrie who had a big impact on my career. I am very grateful to him and to James Clark for this. After my PhD, I returned to York as a green chemistry research associate and spent some of the most wonderful years of my career to date there. Everything went very well in York; however, after three and a half years as a postdoc, I needed to move on with my career and my life. So, due to personal and family pressures, I decided to move back to Cordoba. In the beginning, this was difficult but I managed to get a nice fellowship and now have a small group of four PhD students and a postdoc starting soon. 

What are the biggest challenges facing young researchers and what’s your advice for someone about to embark on the next step after a PhD or postdoc? 

Innovation is the key to success. You can’t get grant money for doing the same thing that we have been doing for over 20 years, it must be new work. 

Getting funding and grants is challenging, but even with a very small group, such as one masters or PhD student, you can start to do more work. I have met lots of innovative and creative people in Europe and Spain. They have lots of interesting ideas and promising research but the problem is they need basic funding to progress. My advice is to keep trying and not lose courage as generally, if you are unsuccessful, you have to carry on and fight for what you want to do. 

You have quite wide ranging research interests but the theme that underpins it all is green and sustainable chemistry. Why is green chemistry important? 

Green chemistry is going to be everything in the future. We will be using green products made using technology with low environmental impact and utilising locally sourced materials and even waste. The perception of waste as a resource rather than a problem is something we have to change in people’s minds. We still have some work to do there. 

After working in both the UK and Spain, what differences did you experience between the chemical research communities in these countries? 

There are lots of differences. In the UK, there are big funding agencies to support researchers. This is something we lack in Spain, but I must stress that in Spain, I have found that we are good and very competitive in terms of publications and research. We are innovative and creative and I was very pleased to see, when I got back, that there were so many people doing such a great job – it is a big inspiration for me. It is especially apparent with young researchers. They lack resources but are still self-motivated to pursue their dreams, which is very encouraging. I take care of students and encourage them to carry on because I can see that this degree of motivation is getting them everywhere. I love teaching – there is always a way to engage the students to learn about chemistry. Being a young academic often helps because students feel closer to you as there is not an age barrier. The language and the way you communicate with the students are not so different. 

Where does your funding come from? 

At the moment it’s mostly national and regional funding. This wasn’t particularly easy to get, but the government supports young researchers with groundbreaking ideas. The funding I received is aimed at early career researchers and for me, after proposing one of these groundbreaking concepts, it was helpful that I could get some funding – it allowed me to go back to Cordoba. 

Hopefully, at the end of October, I will try my best to be successful with a European bid, which could potentially put me in a more stable situation and allow me to grow a bigger group. This funding, called a ‘Starting Research Grant’ is indeed a lot of money – 1.5 million Euros – so it could have a big impact on my career. Its purpose is to allow someone to develop ideas and start an independent research group that could lead to important developments for Europe. We plan to work with lignocellulosics and lignin, one of our main targets. 

What do you like to do when you are not doing chemistry? 

I love travelling – it’s one of my favourite things, so I have been all over the world except for Australia and New Zealand. When I’m at home, I’m addicted to video games; I must admit that I am a big fan. Other than that, I love music, so if I wasn’t a chemist I would probably be a DJ.

Read some of Rafael Luque’s latest work in Green Chemistry by following the links below:

Catalytically active self-assembled silica-based nanostructures containing supported nanoparticles
Camino Gonzalez-Arellano, Alina Mariana Balu, Rafael Luque and Duncan J. Macquarrie
Green Chem., 2010, 12, 1995-2002

Magnetically separable nanoferrite-anchored glutathione: aqueous homocoupling of arylboronic acids under microwave irradiation
Rafael Luque, Babita Baruwati and Rajender S. Varma
Green Chem., 2010, 12, 1540-1543

Highly active and selective supported iron oxide nanoparticles in microwave-assisted N-alkylations of amines with alcohols
Camino Gonzalez-Arellano, Kenta Yoshida, Rafael Luque and Pratibha L. Gai
Green Chem., 2010, 12, 1281-1287