The Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Editor’s collection is a showcase of some of the best articles published in the journal, hand selected by our Associate Editors and Editorial Board members. For this month’s selection, Judy I-Chia Wu has highlighted some of her favourite recent works. Take a look at what she thought of the articles below, and find out more about the research and the researchers behind the papers in our interviews with the authors.
Judy’s Selection:
Ya-Zhou Liu, Xiao Mu, Cheih-Kai Chan, Koen Robeyns, Cheng-Chung Wang and Michael L. Singleton
Judy’s comments: “Water binding is known to play an important role in stabilizing the structures of many biopolymers such as DNA, lignin, and protein structures. Here, Singleton and co-workers show that water binding also can be used to control fluxional movements of foldamers, highlighting an underappreciated aspect of conformation control in synthetic oligomers.”
Find out more in our interview with the authors
Plasma induced acceleration and selectivity in strain-promoted azide–alkyne cycloadditions
David Warther, Enes Dursun, Marion Recher, Sylvain Ursuegui, Michel Mosser, Joanna Sobska, Wojciech Krezel, Guilhem Chaubet and Alain Wagner
Judy’s comments: “Strain-promoted azide–alkyne cycloadditions (SPAAC) are an important class of bioorthogonal reactions, but kinetic studies of these reactions have been limited to solvents and mixtures that do not reflect the environment of in vivo systems. Here, Chaubet, Wagner and co-workers report the important effects of considering a complex medium, opening doors to studying in vivo applications of SPAAC reactions.”
Find out more in our interview with the authors
Recent advances in single-benzene-based fluorophores: physicochemical properties and applications
Jaehoon Kim, Ji Hyeon Oh and Dokyoung Kim
Judy’s comments: “Organic molecule-based fluorophores are opening a new era in biology and materials science. In this review, Kim and co-workers summarize advances in the development of single-benzene-based fluorophores (SBBFs) in the past 15 years. It continues to amaze me how small and simple molecules as such can have such broad applications in chemistry!”
Meet the Editor:
Judy I-Chia Wu, OBC Editorial Board Member
Judy is a physical organic chemist and currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Georgia under the supervision of Professor Paul Schleyer.
Her current research interests span topics in ground and excited-state aromaticity and antiaromaticity, photochemistry, supramolecular chemistry, and enzyme catalysis.
